Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I think the key take aways are as follows. Prerequisite is the understanding that the Fed has a mandate to: maximize (productive?) employment, and maintain inflation at 2%.

- Employment is very high, as it stands. The intention of easy money was to maintain purchasing power, and prevent household shocks due to government shutdowns during the pandemic. It is being used by companies to game the market, and win as evidenced by this change, producing demand-side inflation.

- Productivity is low, as measured presumably by per-capita GDP projections. Indicating continued economic dislocations between prices and corporate activities. Investments are concentrating into unproductive sectors. Capital inflows aren't improving productivity, so the cost of productivity is going up -- supply-side inflation.

- Households and businesses are still gobbling up a lot of debt OR a lot of savings, spurred on by USD inflation -- to employ those individuals, to live outside reasonable means -- or preparing "for the worst." This is the manifestation of the K-shaped recovery, where activities are significantly altered, in anticipation of near-term economic changes. Acquisitions probably would highlight this, but the branches of government have talked FAANG out of this but Broadcom-VMWare highlights a counterexample.

The narrative that is latched onto by investors pertains to the Fed's intention to hike rates until employment begins to fall, he states that they're planning on "overshooting" the fed-funds rate, so that business investment will fall, and concentrate onto more reliable business-models. Jerome Powell also invoked Paul Volkert, basically to signal that risk assets are no longer a key-metric being observed.



> Investments are concentrating into unproductive sectors.

With all the bullshit startups over the past decade or two, I thought this was accepted as the new normal.


When Google ripped Microsoft a new Chrome, this was supposed to free up some gears, and it did -- because of under-investment in employees at the time, and the malleability of software it was all soft goods.

Bottom line, the product improved.

When Zillow rips the housing sector an expensive and unfunded demand for renovation -- this is where the "growth" investment thesis starts to break down, a massive acquisition of hard goods, made possible because of risk-asset price inflation.

Bottom line, the product is worse for the foreseeable.

It's icky, but thankfully these types of radioactive business models are getting identified sooner rather than later.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: