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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

> To be clear, deflation is categorically bad for a currency. It's terrible, like great depression terrible.

I hear this argument a lot, but no nation that we know of has ever collapsed because of deflation, right? We've never (recently) been in a period of significant deflation, so how can we be so certain of its effects?

> deflation makes it more profitable to do nothing than to invest.

Investment won't ever stop, it just behaves more like a there is a minimum interest rate. No matter what the deflation is, I can still loan out $100 and expect $110 back within a year and make a bigger profit than holding on to it.

People will still work, and spend what they need to. And there's a limit to how much a currency can deflate before it cycles back. And hell, how do we even know that inflationary/deflationary cycles are unhealthy? Even if it causes some businesses to die, maybe this improves an economy in the long term by churning things up a bit.

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>Investment won't ever stop, it just behaves more like a there is a minimum interest rate. No matter what the deflation is, I can still loan out $100 and expect $110 back within a year and make a bigger profit than holding on to it.

But is that $10 profit going to be worth the risk of default when an investor could get a satisfactory return by just sitting on the money in the first place? What incentive does an investor have to take bets and possibly lose thousands or millions of dollars when his money appreciates considerably without doing anything?

To use a case from the bitcoin economy, we all know the story of the pizza that someone bought when the x-rate was something like 3 cents per coin. Today, the 10k btc spent on that pizza would have been worth $100k! This story is often told to try to incent people to get into btc, with the implication that "if you forgo the cost of one pizza, in a little while that will be worth thousands of dollars", without realizing that this exactly is the problem with a btc-based economy; if everyone is forgoing their metaphorical pizza in the hope of exponential growth in currency value, the market will be unusable.

People loans each other bitcoin in the bitcoin economy all the time, abiet with high interest rate.

if everyone is forgoing their metaphorical pizza in the hope of exponential growth in currency value, the market will be unusable.

The demand for pizza will be low, but not zero, because the desire for pizza competes with desire for monetary profit. At some point in the future, people decides that the waiting is enough, and they will buy pizza as reward for all their patience.

Good luck. You're swimming against a tide of people minted from education with the mindset of deflation bad, inflation good.

Of course, everyone likes deflation when it means they can buy more for less. Of course, if prices of things get so low that people start to purchase, then deflation will eventually reverse, unless you assume that deflation will continue forever until prices reach zero and everything is free. Of course, everyone force-fed a diet of Keynes assumes that hoarding relates to stuffing mattresses full of money instead of holding cash in banks, where the bank can lend the money out and still invest. They uncritically swallow the line that a central bank inflating at will is the best thing for an economy.

Inflation/deflation are just two phenomena with different winners and losers, the same as high/low currency values. Deflation favors lenders and savers, and inflation favors borrowers and spenders.

The inflationists always assume that the borrow/spend nexus is far more important than the lend/save. But of course saving drives all investment, so a period of deflation isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact we see deflation in specific markets like housing which helps to clear out the bad decisions and mistakes and set the base for future expansion.

Once you clear your head of the foolish 'borrow and spend' mantra of the last 80 or so years, and realise that investment and production are more important than spending and consuming, it becomes obvious that a bit of mild deflation isn't necessarily the hobgoblin it is made out to be.

The simple fact is that no economy and social order has ever imploded due to deflation, but inflation has some pretty terrible economic and social effects when it gets out of control. Deflation, like any long position, can only ever go down to zero. Inflation, however, is like any short position and can go to infinity.

Just because people hold money in bank does not mean that the banks will lend people money. In fact, after being bailed out with TARP, many banks did not turn around and increase the amount of lending that they were doing. However, most of them did pay back their lender (the Fed).

As with anything, too much of any extreme is bad. Too much inflation or too much deflation. But with fiat currency, it's natural to expect steady inflation over time -- especially if it's not tied to a commodity (e.g. after we got off the gold standard). That's because there's value in lending money to some enterprise, and that's the time value of money. Organizations with good credit (e.g. banks) issue and lend money to organizations with worse credit. So they will expect a return in the enterprise, and overall if they guess right, the enterprise will have returned principal + interest to the lender. If they don't then the money disappears from the system, but in most booming economic times, more money is created, and eventually more money is printed to provide more base money in order to pay back all that interest.

So it's like an elastic money supply that's being prodded by lenders / banks looking for a return.

> If they don't then the money disappears from the system, but in most booming economic times, more money is created, and eventually more money is printed to provide more base money in order to pay back all that interest.

The financial systems works different.

You seem to be conflating wealth and money. Money doesn't disappear from the system when someone fails to repay a loan. (Unless you are taking a rather wide, but still sane, definition of money, and hold that lending increases the money supply.)

No extra money needs to be printed to pay back all that interest. That's because central banks pay a dividend to their governments.

I am talking about M2 money supply shrinking when borrowers default and/or banks fail, as in the great depression -- right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#United_States

Also I am not sure what mechanism you are describing when you say that central banks pay dividends to their governments. On the contrary, governments like the US use their central banking system to do open market operations on bonds they issue to finance their operations, and usually have to pay interest on that debt. No?

> Also I am not sure what mechanism you are describing when you say that central banks pay dividends to their governments.

Please see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank#Currency_issuance:

"The European Central Bank remits its interest income to the central banks of the member countries of the European Union. The US Federal Reserve remits all its profits to the U.S. Treasury."

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bundesbank#Gewinn has some more information, but you have to speak German (or use Google Translate). Lower than expected profits of the Bundesbank have been in the news in 2011.

>"In fact we see deflation in specific markets like housing which helps to clear out the bad decisions and mistakes and set the base for future expansion."

Periods of asset deflation after over-investment/economic distortions may act as a balance, but it isn't "good". Having your net worth halved is crippling.

>"The simple fact is that no economy and social order has ever imploded due to deflation"

No economy implodes due to deflation or inflation alone. Countries like Germany or Zimbabwe had production capacity collapse. That led to printing money (to stave off deflation), which in turn led to hyperinflation. Too much money chasing too few goods, remember? In order to have too few goods, the country's production has to go into the toilet.

Saying deflation isn't bad flies in the face of many of the greatest economic minds we know, with tons of research and theory to back it up.

I'm actually genuinely curious what research and theory you are referring to, and I wouldn't know where to start looking. Could you give me some pointers?

You could start with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian school if you're interested in a serious defense of anti-Keynesianism.

Note: I'm not saying I agree with them, just answering your question.

You can start with anything by Bernanke related to the subject, both writings and speeches.

Careful with reading bias into what I have written.

I have not said deflation is good, or said that it is not bad.

I have merely stated it creates winners and losers, and that inflation isn't automatically better. The same as a 'high' or 'low' currency - the goodness or badness depends on the reference frame.

The assumption that inflation is automatically better is 'common knowledge' based on theories of economics developed that classify savings as bad, and spending as good, based on the assumption that deflation will cause consumption to be postponed, but which hand-waves away the problem of inflation bringing forward consumption with the trite statement of 'in the long run we are all dead'.

My point is that deflation isn't the bogeyman many have been trained to believe it is. Spending-based assumptions of economics have led the world down a garden path of unsustainable debt in the name of endless 'stimulus' and inflationary policies. Periods of mild deflation and creative destruction would have served the world better than endless shots of new cheap money.

>"The assumption that inflation is automatically better is 'common knowledge' based on theories of economics developed that classify savings as bad, and spending as good, based on the assumption that deflation will cause consumption to be postponed, but which hand-waves away the problem of inflation bringing forward consumption with the trite statement of 'in the long run we are all dead'."

That's only part of the argument.

Another part is that wages also must decrease with deflation (wages are an input price). And that's very difficult to pull off in a modern economy, and leads to unemployment. We are seeing that right now.

The fact of the matter is, we should be indifferent to either inflation or deflation, as long as we can see the changes coming and adjust quickly enough. In reality, we can't. Hence an ever-increasing money supply (to coincide with an ever-increasing demand for money) is the best bet.

>"based on theories of economics developed that classify savings as bad"

I've never encountered that argument.

>My point is that deflation isn't the bogeyman

Look at this thread. Look at Seeking Alpha. Look at Reddit. You think people are over-reacting to deflation? People everywhere are hyperventilating over out of control inflation, when, in fact, our current problems are associated with a deflationary event ($3.5TT wiped from the collective financial sector sheets).

> Having your net worth halved is crippling.

"Having your net worth halved" happens in the inflation scenario. Deflation increases your net worth.

If you have $10,000 and there's inflation, then eventually it will only buy half as much stuff. If you have $10,000 and there's deflation, then eventually it will buy twice as much.

>""Having your net worth halved" happens in the inflation scenario. Deflation increases your net worth."

Interesting. We've been in a positive inflation environment since I've been born, and my net worth has increased exponentially.

Deflation will increase the purchasing power of your money due to the fall in prices, but decrease the value of assets you own priced in that currency. Something people seem to be forgetting around here are that wages also fall during deflation, and that results in lower purchasing power and unemployment. Your "work" isn't worth as much anymore. You get paid less. Good deal!

What happened when the housing bubble collapsed and there was massive deflation in home prices? Did those people get wealthier? Did it become easier for other people to spend their dollars on homes at the new low prices? The answer is no and no.

> Did it become easier for other people to spend their dollars on homes at the new low prices?

Why is the answer to this question "no"?

>"I hear this argument a lot, but no nation that we know of has ever collapsed because of deflation, right?"

And which have collapsed from inflation? None, directly. Hyperinflation (and deflation) is an effect of an economy collapsing. Not a cause.

From Wiki: "Hyperinflation is often associated with wars, their aftermath, sociopolitical upheavals, or other crises that make it difficult for the government to tax the population, as a sudden and sharp decrease in tax revenue coupled with a strong effort to maintain the status quo can be a direct trigger of hyperinflation."

Note "decrease in tax revenue". Economic crisis > deflation > country can't pay the bills > hyper-inflates currency.

A curious retelling of history.

The Weimar Republic intentionally inflated their currency to reduce the WW1 reparations payments, which got out of control and reduced the value of the Mark to nothing.

Inflationary policies collapsed the tax base due to destroying the ability of the economy to function normally, not the other way around.

This is easily shown by the fact that as soon as the Weimar Republic re-introduced an asset-backed stable currency, the economic problems improved greatly, though there were deflationary periods after that caused by the massive economic upheaval.

>A curious retelling of history.

By you, perhaps.

Economic crisis, couldn't pay the bills, so they inflated the currency. Just like I said. Are you really going to argue that there was no war or aftermath, social upheaval or other crisis (like, say, debilitating war reparations) that led to hyperinflation? Crisis comes first.

So often Wiemar Germany is trotted out as the example of what can happen when the government prints excessively. "It can happen to you! Wheel-barrows full of money to buy bread!" The reality, the country and its economy was in shambles. Not because of inflation.

Your turn: point to an economy that was happily chugging along, and hyperinflation came out of nowhere and took it down.

> I hear this argument a lot, but no nation that we know of has ever collapsed because of deflation, right?

The Weimar Republic, arguably.

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