Last time you wrote about inflation I was at an extremely packed Disneyworld. This morning I’m in an extremely packed London where inflation is 11 percent. And just like the House of the Mouse, every hotel is booked (we tried to add an extra night), every tour is full, even the National Gallery was packed, and walking around last night in the suburbs, every restaurant was full. There’s a lot of money chasing goods everywhere.
1. No victory lap. The Bernanke-Yellin recession was just dereliction of duty. You do not get the the Medal of Honor for not deserting under fire.
2. Although the Fed acted very quickly to the Feb 2020 panic, it could have done better. The TIPS should never have been allowed to fall as much as it did. The Fed should have been flooding the market with so much liquidity in early 2020 that something like the PPP monstrosity would not have been thunk up and the eviction moratoria would have been unnecessary. [Congress should have installed the proper generous, automatic, Federally funded UI system that they failed to install in 2009, but that is not the Fed's fault.]
3. The early explanations about inflation being "temporary" [and people in the Biden Administration should have kept their mouths shut except to have confidence that the Fed would do its job] should have been more explicit that a) above target inflation when the economy is hit by supply shocks is salutary and b) that the salutary inflation WILL be temporary becasue we will make dammed sure that it IS temporary.
4. And then in at least September they should have started visibly making it temporary. That would have permitted a mini-reversal in February to allow for the additional shock of the disruption to Ukraine grain exports.
Back in the day, 1954 High School, my moag friends and I went out to the local orchards to get drunk. I had a camera and took a photo of one of the guys. He was taking. a leak. He was hung like a stud horse. I had the film developed and gave him the photo. Next I noticed him and a group of girls viewing the photo. And you thought you knew about 1950's High School culture.
Had a very different take on the high school canceling story - kid does stupid but extremely, extremely common teenager thing that is the predictable consequence of giving horny/stupid kids unsupervised use of internet devices with cameras, schoolmates go on a vicious, noxiously self-righteous and almost certainly hypocritical campaign of ostracism totally out of proportion to the offense, on top of that, dragging in a bunch of other kids who did nothing at all. To what end? I don’t believe it will discourage future drunken photo-sharers - that behavior is at least as old as the Polaroid camera.
I would be furious if my kids engaged in this kind of ostracism, especially the enforcement against others. They can make their own decisions about who to be friends with, of course. But policing others is not in their remit.
Last time you wrote about inflation I was at an extremely packed Disneyworld. This morning I’m in an extremely packed London where inflation is 11 percent. And just like the House of the Mouse, every hotel is booked (we tried to add an extra night), every tour is full, even the National Gallery was packed, and walking around last night in the suburbs, every restaurant was full. There’s a lot of money chasing goods everywhere.
1. No victory lap. The Bernanke-Yellin recession was just dereliction of duty. You do not get the the Medal of Honor for not deserting under fire.
2. Although the Fed acted very quickly to the Feb 2020 panic, it could have done better. The TIPS should never have been allowed to fall as much as it did. The Fed should have been flooding the market with so much liquidity in early 2020 that something like the PPP monstrosity would not have been thunk up and the eviction moratoria would have been unnecessary. [Congress should have installed the proper generous, automatic, Federally funded UI system that they failed to install in 2009, but that is not the Fed's fault.]
3. The early explanations about inflation being "temporary" [and people in the Biden Administration should have kept their mouths shut except to have confidence that the Fed would do its job] should have been more explicit that a) above target inflation when the economy is hit by supply shocks is salutary and b) that the salutary inflation WILL be temporary becasue we will make dammed sure that it IS temporary.
4. And then in at least September they should have started visibly making it temporary. That would have permitted a mini-reversal in February to allow for the additional shock of the disruption to Ukraine grain exports.
5. Ain't 20/20 hindsight great! :)
Re: Cancel Culture
Back in the day, 1954 High School, my moag friends and I went out to the local orchards to get drunk. I had a camera and took a photo of one of the guys. He was taking. a leak. He was hung like a stud horse. I had the film developed and gave him the photo. Next I noticed him and a group of girls viewing the photo. And you thought you knew about 1950's High School culture.
Had a very different take on the high school canceling story - kid does stupid but extremely, extremely common teenager thing that is the predictable consequence of giving horny/stupid kids unsupervised use of internet devices with cameras, schoolmates go on a vicious, noxiously self-righteous and almost certainly hypocritical campaign of ostracism totally out of proportion to the offense, on top of that, dragging in a bunch of other kids who did nothing at all. To what end? I don’t believe it will discourage future drunken photo-sharers - that behavior is at least as old as the Polaroid camera.
I would be furious if my kids engaged in this kind of ostracism, especially the enforcement against others. They can make their own decisions about who to be friends with, of course. But policing others is not in their remit.
Re: Web3
This sentence:
"Blockchains are special computers that anyone can access but no one owns"
Who pays for the purchase of the computers and pays for rent of the building and the electricity bill? Someone who can turn off the damned computers.