JanisL

The last time I went to a bank I remember thinking the loan terms were pretty bad for the business I was involved in relative to equity approaches. Why do you think there's been a shift towards equity financing? I wasn't looking at anything in this space a few decades ago, is it because debt financing options are worse or equity better?

I think the reverse repo situation sheds some light on why this wasn't happening as much earlier: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRPONTSYD/

Put simply there's now a glut of money that is waiting to be invested via loans in anything that has a good ROI with low enough risks. In the past due to higher interest rates and various other factors (including regulatory) this glut of money just didn't exist before.

I think this is entirely dependent on the country in question because rules around central bank operations are very different in different parts of the world. Some can directly create money and some can even seize assets.

Note that if Central bank digital currencies are allowed then Central banks will most certainly be able to influence the currency in circulation with much more power than they currently do.

> IDK why everyone on HN thinks that the affluent have debt, when in fact, the bottom 50% of Americans hold less that 4% of wealth because most of them are in net debt, largely to entities owned by the affluent.

The wealthiest people by definition have more equity than they do debt (which is why they are wealthy) but that doesn't mean that they don't hold debt. I think this is why most people think the affluent have debt obligations and frankly in the current markets there are incentives to have debt when real rates are this negative. Poorer people are also holding more debt, basically there's a lot more debt everywhere these days.

Regarding the chart CPI is not the same as monetary inflation but yet CPI is frequently used to make inflation-adjusted securities. And since CPI does all sorts of intellectually dishonest mental gymnastics with regards to "hedonic adjustments" these days its a less reliable metric than it was in the past of how cost of living has changed over time: https://wolfstreet.com/2019/12/05/what-worries-me-about-hedo...

They already have been doing things like this. The Nikkei 225 is more than half owned by the BoJ for example.

Only some equities are inflation proof. Other equities will be crushed by inflation because inflation will put pressure on higher interest rates and companies with high debt loads will get crushed by higher rates.

For a lot of it this comes down to mortgages. Someone who has a $4million mansion with a $1million loan has more debt in an absolute nominal number sense than someone with no assets and a $10k credit card debt. That said as household debt increases (due to things like credit cards) we are having a shift whereby many people on net own less than zero. For this group higher inflation won't be as bad as the impact on wealth as far as the debt/assets side of things goes. However it will still likely be bad for the poorest because wages tend to lag behind inflation and if the poorest people need their wages to service their debts they might still be falling behind more as a result of inflation. As always inflation will still be bad for anyone who is attempting to save money. On top of all this we have things like the Cantillon effect, so I just don't think higher inflation is as good for the poor - even with their newfound indebtedness - as people might be claiming.

After studying a lot of economics over the last few years I realized that most people have a poor understanding of the concept of debt so I stopped using the term technical debt almost entirely.

Currency debasement combined with low interest rates in nominal terms combined with extremely negative interest rates in real terms is driving a huge portion of the nominal gains in housing everywhere in the last few years. If housing is operating in a bubble the prices can continue to go up without fundamentals supporting it for quite a long time. There's also a huge number of policy decisions that have been made to prop up the real estate market. See Evergrande's issues lately for how this can eventually end up playing out when the new money stops coming in and the regulatory framework changes regarding leverage (in this case the three red lines policy changes forcing deleveraging).

I can't say I'm entirely surprised, occupancy rates in Melbourne's commercial real estate are exceptionally low at the moment: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ghost-town-warni...

The concept of "no code" has been in existence for much longer than the term "no code" has been in use. For example Excel spreadsheets have existed longer than the term "no code" and these allow people from a non software background to automate some of their tasks, but even now we don't tend to call this "no code". There's very specific connotations with the term, which is why I think at the moment "no code" is typically used as a marketing and sales play. This is something I wrote about in more depth here: https://www.lesinskis.com/whats-the-deal-with-no-code.html

Generally speaking the vast majority of money is created by the private sector and not the government. For the Fed to be able to "fix" this by printing more money would already represent a large systematic change. This isn't impossible but fending off a deflationary shock is far more complex than people tend to assume, I think in part because of underlying assumptions that the majority of monetary creation is done by the government when in fact that may not be the case.

Distributed version control intrinsically has difficult concepts, I find a lot of people who claim these things to be user unfriendly are struggling with the concepts of distributed version control. If you struggle with these concepts all the DVCS systems will be hard to use. While there's some rough edges with Git it's worth noting that at the time it was created most of the alternatives were significantly worse to use.

Melbourne Australia is in the third year of population decline now. I know on top of this population shift that a huge number of the major employers have shifted towards much more work from home arrangements due to the pandemic and due to the the 263 days of lockdowns that were imposed I think many of these changes will last for longer than in places that were less disrupted. That said I still think commercial real estate prices here are artificially high/in a bubble because of the high number of vacancies even if there's already been a pullback in prices. Just structurally speaking the demand side for commercial real estate here has substantially fallen, but I'm not sure the same can be said for other parts of the world right now. I'd be curious to know more about what's happening in other locations as I feel like Melbourne is a bit of an outlier in many regards.

There's an important distinction to be made between fake news which is deliberately misleading and the concept of fiat news which is when information is passed along with no checks and balances in environments where people explicitly assume that there are checks and balances. We see this in the media but now also increasingly in academia as journals seem to be performing the review function less effectively than before. There's an article that I think explains the difference between these two problems that is worth reading: https://www.epsilontheory.com/fiat-money-fiat-news/

I feel like when currencies are abandoned there's a de-facto hyperinflation involved in the old currency if looked at from the exchange rates involved. Perhaps there's been examples of currency replacement in the past that have been driven by non-economic factors?

Given the intersection of social media and monetary policy this article seems entirely relevant: https://www.epsilontheory.com/fiat-money-fiat-news/

While inflation is a monetary phenomenon I think hyperinflation is mostly a psychological phenomenon characterized by a lack of confidence in a currency. Fiscal policy changes could certainly change confidence or so could a number of other things.

At the moment we have a monetary system that's a debt based monetary system. In practice this means that many people are operating under the assumption that someone's liability is someone else's asset, I think this assumption is rather systemic at the moment. Beyond a certain level of indebtedness a rise in interest rates triggers off a chain of defaults and that can cause a situation of credit contagion. An uncontrolled credit contagion event could very conceivably destroy the financial system. Much power is currently held by creditors and they will likely try to fight any attempts to change policy in such a way that reduces their power.

Here's a much more long form article that talks about the dynamics in play: https://desogames.substack.com/p/the-problem-is-too-big

With debt to GDP at such high ratios raising interest rates has some challenges, why do you think this is easy to deal with?

Only people who don't understand the wealth destroying affects of hyperinflation will actually cheer for it.

There is absolutely no shortage of workers at the lower end of the skills range, there is however a big monetary issue at play that prevents people from hiring people locally in a number of different situations. On top of this there are regulatory and taxation imbalances that make certain industries unable to compete with foreign firms that don't have those issues. The problems are frequently the price of labor not the raw availability of labor, people certainly will take on jobs if there is enough pay to make those jobs worth taking.

Completely agree with all this. One thing that makes rock climbing and golf good for building connections is that there's relatively large gaps in time where you can talk with people while doing the activity (eg walking to the next hole, waiting for someone to finish a climb, etc). Some other activities just don't have this same dynamic so while you'd meet people for sure it would take longer to have conversations with people.

I find it a bit depressing that the "you need to change jobs to get raises" dynamic is being seen in hospitals now as well.

Its because same day delivery takes a rather large investment in logistics systems that they may not have ready to go.

I think there's a part of this that most people don't consider which is the eurodollar system. A lot of money is created by the private sector via banks and in a typical time the majority of money creation is actually done by the private sector. In the case of the US dollar being the gloabl reserve currency and used for global trade much of the money creation is done via offshore banks. So if this eurodollar system stops creating new money at the same rates as before then it's entirely possible for hard currency creation to go up without it being as inflationary as it would otherwise appear.

It wasn't so clear but I was mostly thinking of the management when I wrote that comment. In this particular case I think people might get caught up on what an individual did but I think the management failing here is the far bigger deal.

I've noticed more as time has gone on people are working on critical software without the skills or organizational structures required to actually do so safely. What I'm wondering is if this is a change that's happened more broadly or is just something that I didn't notice before? Overall the average years of experience in the industry has dropped in the last decade due to the influx of new developers but what's the deal with inexperienced people working on critical systems without oversight from people with more experience?

While I feel the failures from the developer here are pretty bad I feel the organizational factors that allows this situation to happen are far worse.

Where I was working at the time had no employees in the USA but yet we all got this email telling us how to vote in the upcoming USA election. Given none of us had the right to vote in the USA elections we found this email to be very strange.

The pain in the Python 2->3 conversion I found came more from in house packages being written in Python 2 rather than public packages.