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The Ray Rice video for the financial sector has arrived.

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by YankeeFan, Sep 26, 2014.

  1. Oggiedoggie

    Oggiedoggie Well-Known Member

    It seems to me that economists are today about where meteorologists where more than a half century or more ago.

    Sometimes, they sort of know what might have happened after a particular event.

    Predictions are pretty sketchy.

    Being able to control what happens is still a long way in the future, if it's even possible.

    No matter how hard I try to pretend that it's really important, it's usually just plain boring.
     
  2. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    And after 2 + years since he first invented (no wait, it was New Zealand's invention in 1990. ... ha ha) that bullshit to hold off the wolves, trying to create inflation, and announcing it is now "widely accepted" (too bad he didn't say that!) as a good thing?

    Because in order to create a world of "stable" prices, you need an authority like Big Ben to create as much inflation as he can muster with his shrinking toolbox (he destroyed his own tools!) -- even if he has to do Soviet-style interventions in the debt markets to try to create inflation, dammit.

    Just listen to Uncle Ben. He knows what is best for you, right, cran? Don't worry, it won't get out of control and ever bring about a Volckeresque panic response. How could that ever happen?

    Ben'll (well, Ben is gone, but Janet is there now with her lasso) personally wrestle the bull to the ground when he thinks the time is right (and only he will know when that will be, because he is Super Ben). Right after he sets the Guinness record for dribbling a football. He's that talented! If he had been on the Titanic, he would have smelled the iceberg and hung a quick right.

    Right now, though, Ben needs you to nod your head in sync, cran, when he tells you he needed to hijack our debt markets, and whip everyone into a frenzy by dropping money from helicopters. He needed to create inflation, because THAT is the secret to economic health. We widely accept that. If anyone says otherwise, tell them they are looney tunes.

    Ignore the people with thousands of dollars living like millionaires. Ignore everyone borrowing and using the money to gamble on the markets. Ignore the trillion dollars of student debt that is primed to implode and unleash a systematic financial risk when there is a catalyst or rates rise. Ignore people without verifiable incomes borrowing to buy $40,000 cars. How could any of that stuff end badly?

    Don't worry about your retirement, cran. Just keep borrowing. Saving is baaaaad. Ben says it is OK. His beard has your back.

    Keep your eye on 2012, not 2008, cran. Because it was 2012, not 2008, when Uncle Ben gave us pearls that we all widely accept, and told us that we need to light a fire and keep throwing logs on it to try to create 2 percent inflation using some rigged measure (not 1 percent, not 2.7 percent!) if we want a healthy economy. Duh. Who would question that?

    But by all means, definitely forget all the stuff Ben said in 2008. Ben knows it doesn't seem like the economy healed the way he promised when he said he needed to take do unprecedented things, and then laid his Jesus hands on it. But we all need to move on and just keep trusting, cran. So forget 2008, 2009, 2010 when "2 percent inflation" wasn't the target, and let's stay with the widely accepted truism that "2 percent inflation targets create strong economies." And lets all pray for our purchasing power to evaporate -- the sooner the better.

    You'll be able to borrow forever without any limit, so no biggie, cran.
     
  3. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    The meteorologist analogy would make sense if you had some meteorologists out there trying to influence the weather, promising 70 and sunny every day, and then doing things that create natural disasters and looming natural disasters for their promise of an hour of sun.

    Macroconomics is actually fairly advanced from an observational standpoint. It's even easy to predict the consequences of their interventions in our markets -- malinvestment, misallocation of capital. What you can't predict precisely is when their interference might lead to a crisis. It all depends on the catalyst to turn the instability they created into a collapse, and that catalyst can come from different places at different times.

    You are correct. Where we do ourselves harm is by allowing people who know very little in reality, to start imagining what they can design and then allowing them to authority to do it.
     
  4. 3_Octave_Fart

    3_Octave_Fart Well-Known Member

    Edit all of your responses by at least two-thirds and I might consider reading them, Milton Friedman Jr.
     
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