BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2023-08-31 Th
Monetary policy via jawbone; MOAR China-in-trouble podcasting; American office occupancy; very briefly noted; Abramitzky & al on immigrants & crime, journamalists angry & jealous of Will Bunch...
Monetary policy via jawbone; MOAR China-in-trouble podcasting; American office occupancy; very briefly noted; & Abramitzky & al. on immigrants & crime, journamalists angry & jealous of Will Bunch, Drezner on peak China, Grossman on Biden’s coalition, & from my Substack…
MUST-READ: Federal Reserve Jawboning Tightens a Notch in August:
Sam Unsted: Policy caution: ‘Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic warned that policymakers need to be cautious to avoid overtightening monetary policy and risking doing any harm to the US labor market. Speaking at an event in South Africa, he said US monetary policy is “appropriately restrictive.” Bostic added: “I think we should be cautious and patient and let the restrictive policy continue to influence the economy, lest we risk tightening too much and inflicting unnecessary economic pain”…
The Treasury 10-Year Inflation-Indexed bond rate says that there has been a 50-basis point move toward tightening in the market’s sense of the relevant intertemporal price structure. (It is the 10-Year that best matches factors important for guiding investments in construction and guiding the trade balance via exchange rates.) This is not the effect of monetary policy through the credibiliity channel. And this is not “animal spirits” as they affect corporate investment decisions—which animal spirits we see through a glass, darkly, in the stock market.
But it is not chopped liver either:
Since September 2022, the Federal Reserve has been validating market expectations about the slope of the intertemporal price system, and thus incentives to spend-vs.-save.
But over the past month, it has talked tough enough to shift the intertemporal price system up by as much as five 25 basis-point short-term interest-rate increases normally do.
Now, having talked tough, does the FOMC want to go and actually make any more interest rate increases? Or will it decide that the jawboning has been all the policy it needs, and that it has done its job by damping-down expectations that short-term interest rates will be cut anytime soon?
ONE AUDIO: Michel Bennon & Frank Fukuyama: China’s Road to Ruin
<https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/democracyIRL>
<https://overcast.fm/itunes1608982461>
ONE IMAGE: Back to þe Office?
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, & Alan M. Taylor (2016): The great mortgaging: housing finance, crises and business cycles: ‘Financial stability risks have been increasingly linked to real estate lending booms, which are typically followed by deeper recessions and slower recoveries…
Ben Thompson: Nvidia on the Mountaintop: ‘Over 50% of… Q2 revenue came from… large cloud service providers, followed by large consumer Internet…. Model training… is… up-front…. Software ecosystem and hardware scalability…. Nvidia has a moat in both…. Upfront payments to TSMC over the last several years to secure its own 4nm line…
Serkan Arslanalp & Barry Eichengreen: Living with High Public Debt: ‘High debts are more of a problem for emerging market… than for most major advanced economies…. Robust demand for the high-quality public-label securities of advanced-country governments…
Laura Alfaro & Davin Chor: Global Supply Chains: The Looming “Great Reallocation”…
Finance: Robin Wigglesworth: A compensation scheme masquerading as an asset class…
Public Sphere: Gurwinder: Why You Are Probably an NPC: ‘And what to do about it…. “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record being played.”― Orwell…. Humans… becoming more botlike… [as] algorithms become better at shaping… behavior…. Botlike behavior… has led to… a meme: the NPC, or Non-Player Character…
GPT-LLM-ML: Casey Newton: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter:
‘They're designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?… Talk to my Notion database… remembering relevant events… perfect memory; all it’s missing is a usable chat interface… [then] a perfect research assistant…
Journamalism: Nicholas Grossman: The Media Still Doesn’t Get Biden Voters: ‘And barely even tries…. I’ve never seen centrists… say to people on the right… that it’s important to read progressives…. Nor have I seen traditional conservatives… call for empathy with people on the left, or claim that any left-wing extremism is merely an inevitable reaction to centrist and conservative elites’ mistakes…. I turned to crowdsourcing, asking on social media whether anyone knew of examples of journalists making the case for trying to understand the Biden voter…
Parker Molloy: Give Me a Reason to Write, "The News Media is Doing a Great Job About Informing Americans About the State of Their Country!" and I Will: ‘A snarky tweet [by Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, author of that jouranlistic gem “Trump’s White Bronco Moment”] in response to a really good column has me rolling my eyes…
Neofascism: Nick Cohen: Daniel Hannan and the emptying of the Conservative mind: ‘Reviewing Foster’s What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About It … all Hannan could manage was… yobbish playground jeering…. could not defend Brexit or offer solutions… [but only\ tell the British to “move on” …
NOTED, & SubStack Posts:
It is not possible to work hard enough to find any empirical support for any ideas about how immigrants to America are or are in any sense predisposed to be a “criminal element”. True now. True in the past:
And the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, author of that highest-quality journalism story “Trump’s White Bronco Moment”, doesn’t like the smart, careful, and worthy Will Bunch:
IMHO, the right way to read Thoukydides on “The Peloponnesian War” is to look forward 80 years to Aristoteles and his diagnosis of Sparta’s oliganthropia problem—Spartan power had peaked around the year -440 because rich Spartiate men married rich Spartiate women, and so the number of Spartiates who could afford to acquire and train in the panoply fell generation after generation. All Athens had to do was to avoid a major war, and grow its commerce and its empire. But it did not:
Most Americans are Bidenists:
A tangential comment on the "Public Sphere: Gurwinder: Why You Are Probably an NPC: ‘And what to do about it….".
This piece references a real issue, but does it rather poorly, at least in my opinion.
Also, some of the references seemed odd to me, so I took a look for other work from Gurwinder Bhogal, only to find that he is the author of "Antiracism is Racist" (https://rabbitholemag.com/antiracism-is-racist/ ), among other gems.
Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick, & Alan M. Taylor How did these guys predict the abysmal failure of the 2008-2020 failure by the Fed to a garden variety financial hiccough?