26 Comments

It is almost as if they are waiting for altars to be set up where workers are sacrificed to the Inflation God.

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The FED's actions are the equivalent of Ptolemaic cosmology's false belief in epicycles, and the only thing that will wake them up is a new paradigm concept strategically applied so as to resolve the problems they think they're addressing and that changes the temporal universe reality of the entire pattern of economics.

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Who’s responsibility is it to invest in increasing the the size of the workforce, including education, training, immigration, helping those who have given up on work?

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This just straight Psed me off...... Powell: We want to see a lot of things but especially wages coming down. --- nothing from the bankers about profit greed, just wages...........

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The goal is not to beat inflation but to put uppity labor in its place.

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Why not make it a $10 trillion coin? It seems to me that it doesn't really matter whether the act of DEPOSITING the coin in the Treasury's account at the Fed is legal or not. As soon as the first dime of that deposit is SPENT, the Treasury (and thus the executive branch) will be in violation of the constitution which stipulates that Congress (the legislative branch) alone has the power to authorize federal spending. And Democrats have to be willing to say: "Yeah? So what?"

Democrats have to stop acting like the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." These election-denying "Republicans in Fame Only" have zero intention of coming to an agreement on the debt ceiling. They want to burn down the House, and this is their last best chance to do so before the GOP gets slaughtered in 2024. There is zero good faith in the current "negotiations."

Pay attention to what they're doing. MAGA Republicans are holding "investigations" that will ultimately go nowhere. So what's the point? They want to show the base WHY the utterly "corrupt" gov't needs to be overthrown. And once the gov't defaults and can no longer pay the D.C. Capitol Police and National Guard and Congress is thereby rendered completely defenseless, these Republicans will say to their base: "Now this is HOW you can successfully accomplish on June 5 what you couldn't achieve on Jan. 6. Take the Capitol. No one's there to stop you."

It will be a miracle if we can avoid a 2nd Civil War. Democrats have to be willing to get their hands dirty and be prepared to go totally rogue and unconstitutional in order to save the country.

O'Connor's grandmother wound up with 3 bullets in her chest fired by "The Misfit." She deluded herself into thinking this was a man who had Jesus in his heart. Beware of all these "White Christian Nationalists." There's no Jesus there.

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Main takeaways here:

Powell still believes in the Phillips Curve despite no longer being a link between inflation and unemployment.

Powell is still trying to get wages down despite no evidence of a wage/price spiral

Powell isn't too pleased that the labor market continues to show strength.

Powell is trying to cause a foolish uncalled for recession.

Bottom line, the fed is just utterly clueless.

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The discussion on CNN What Matters yesterday was useful. MMT was mentioned positively, albeit a little grudgingly.

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Q. Do you believe the death or disability of between 1 & 3 million prime working age citizens account at least in part for the tight labor market?

Q. In your view, will it be necessary to destroy an adequate number of businesses to account for that number of missing workers?

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So Covid is not an economic question anymore. Missing (dead) workers seem like a labor market issue to me, but I'm not in the Fed chairman so I don't have access to the vetted data.

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Pretty sure economics is a *social* science because there’s no requirement for their models to reflect reality.

I swear, despite his endorsement of crypto, Summers still loves his mid-industrial-age models that describe efficiency based on factories producing widgets.

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"Democracy in Chains!'' The Fed is operating as just another layer to shackle democracy for the benefit of the a few economic elites. You would think (hope) more small business owners could see past their desire to get cheap labor (most don't, has been my experience) and realize the impact from the feds policy to decrease demand in order to increase unemployment and reduce labor wage cost. The Feds policy to maintain low labor cost benefits monopoly corporations with pricing power looking to increase profit margins which also serves wall street shares value.

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I’ve been working through the concept of the trillion dollar coin in my head and through the view of MMT. How can you “just print the money” without causing more inflation or, worse, tipping the US into hyperinflation. I think the light bulb may have clicked. Please check me on this:

We can of course just print the money and buy back existing treasuries to take the US below the arbitrary debt ceiling / advert the made up crisis. That part is easy.

The risk as I see it, we use those dollars to swap out existing treasuries. Now anyone holding this treasuries has dollars instead. Those people/entities are going to be scrambling to reinvest those dollars in something to generate return. If there is scarcity in real assets to invest then it will drive up values and create a bubble. Which in turn can drive inflation and so on and on and on...

Applying MMT, the challenge for the Treasury Dept / Fed would be to print enough money to stop the political nonsense about the debt ceiling and then issue just enough new treasuries to meet investor demand, thus keeping inflation at bay and keeping us well below the political debt ceiling.

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They broke something!

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