Economics Thread

Actually the mistake was more subtle. The infusion of cash (passed in early 2021) was disproportionate to the amount of lost income and idled capacity. But that is a hard one to put on a bumper sticker. The best I can come up with is: Calibrate Better. I'll get some printed but am not hopeful they will be a commercial success.

If you calibrate better you get the good (a faster return to full employment) without the bad (inflation).
 
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I think in 2020 yes I was saying you want to run large deficits a la World War II. But the size of the rebate checks initially championed by what I called the unholy alliance of Sanders and Hawley (and later adopted by the Georgia Democratic senate candidates) were too large by an order of magnitude.

Larry Summers was the one who most clearly articulated the risks and I posted links to his op-ed pieces.
 
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Nationwide Insurance just sent out a customer guide to the impacts of inflation to their whole agency\customer base.

Someone should tell them its just transitive so they can retract that email that went out to millions upon millions of people?
 
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4061315



We use the price effects caused by the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, to study the transfer of wealth across income groups. First, we find that rent control caused property values to fall by 6-7%, for an aggregate loss of $1.6 billion. Both owner-occupied and rental properties lost value, but the losses were larger for rental properties, and in neighborhoods with a higher concentration of rentals. Second, leveraging administrative parcel-level data, we find that the tenants who gained the most from rent control had higher incomes and were more likely to be white, while the owners who lost the most had lower incomes and were more likely to be minorities. For properties with high-income owners and low-income tenants, the transfer of wealth was close to zero. Thus, to the extent that rent control is intended to transfer wealth from high-income to low-income households, the realized impact of the law was the opposite of its intention.

 

It was indeed worth the read, but I definitely don’t think it’s fair to call climate change concerns deeply dubious when the linked counterargument is basically just that we haven’t all died yet. I agree that their core argument that the situation isn’t *quite* as dire as some might argue, I don’t know that there is a strong enough argument advanced that disputes our need to change our reliance on fossil fuels.
 
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It was indeed worth the read, but I definitely don’t think it’s fair to call climate change concerns deeply dubious when the linked counterargument is basically just that we haven’t all died yet. I agree that their core argument that the situation isn’t *quite* as dire as some might argue, I don’t know that there is a strong enough argument advanced that disputes our need to change our reliance on fossil fuels.

Yeah, if I was the editor, I would’ve left the value judgement off the climate change piece because it only distracts from the point.
 
I don't have much of a view on what Musk buying twitter means for the future of western civilization. But the business end looks a little like building one sand castle upon another. Hopefully, there are no rogue waves on the horizon.

[tw]1518773828087910401[/tw]

[tw]1518654074979332097[/tw]
 
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I don't have much of a view on what Musk buying twitter means for the future of western civilization. But the business end looks a little like building one sand castle upon another. Hopefully, there are no rogue waves on the horizon.

[tw]1518773828087910401[/tw]

[tw]1518654074979332097[/tw]

Could end up being stupid, but he strikes me as quite the business man, so I don't doubt him for a minute
 
He's obviously a smart dude. But this twitter purchase strikes me as more than a little impulsive. Not much due diligence as far as I can tell. When you have that kind of dough I guess you can operate like the Yankees. Though the Yankees haven't operated like the Yankees for a while now.
 
He's obviously a smart dude. But this twitter purchase strikes me as more than a little impulsive. Not much due diligence as far as I can tell. When you have that kind of dough I guess you can operate like the Yankees. Though the Yankees haven't operated like the Yankees for a while now.

It shouldn't be hard to turn the most important company in the world into a profit making machine.

Just end the leftist ideology and it will prosper.

5 years from now people are going to wonder how Musk bought it for just 43B.
 
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