Matt Taibbi is another leftist reinventing right-wing liquidationism. You hate to see it.
Step 1: The Fed raises interest rates and stops doing QE despite inflation being below target and unemployment being above target
Step 2: …
Step 3: Socialist utopia!
Step 2, btw, is millions of people losing their jobs for no reason other than incompetent central banking.
Raising interest rates in the middle of an already bad economy is a big part of what turned a no-good recession in 1931 into the Great Depression. Back then, they did it because they were more worried about supporting the gold standard than about supporting employment.
Taibbi wants us to repeat one of the key mistakes of the Great Depression, because ... a bunch of Ron Paul idiots at the far-right conspiracy website Zerohedge told him we should. They believe everything is always a bubble, and that it's better to burn it all down.
The funny thing is that a lot of the hedge fund managers Taibbi loves to make fun of also want the Fed to raise rates because they're afraid of nonexistent inflation eating away at their fortunes. He wants to stick it to them by ... giving them what they want?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I know what WallStreetBets is doing seems pretty hilarious, but they’re just reinventing pyramid schemes.
Short squeezes can also be a good strategy—it’s made WallStreetBets a lot of money!—but going after short-sellers as a general matter isn’t good. Markets need them. Short sellers were the ones ringing the alarm bell about Enron and the housing bubble.
GameStop, like Hertz back in April, is an especially ironic bubble: everyone knows that it can’t last, but they just want to show that they can make it happen for the lulz (and make some money in the meantime).
Thinking you’re in on the con is the easiest way to get conned.
The way the system is biased towards Republicans—gerrymandering, the Senate, & the Electoral College all overrepresent rural/exurban voters who strongly lean GOP—is what Daniel Ziblatt calls “constitutional welfare.”
There’s *a lot* to like in Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package, but $415 billion more for vaccines, testing, and tracing would have the most ridiculous ROI.
The Biden plan will also have bigger and expanded UI, probably the most important thing right now other than the vaccine, and important boosts to the tax-credit safety net—the Child Tax Credit & EITC—that will hopefully become permanent
I'm 36 years old. The two other times in my lifetime that a Republican administration committed serious crimes—Iran-Contra and torture—nothing happened. We looked forwards, not back, etc.
It's not good enough. How will elites learn there are consequences if there never are any?
Democrats need to impeach Trump again, and they need to impeach him today. Inciting a coup, no matter how pitiful it might have been, is as bright as bright red lines get. If Democrats *don't do anything* in response, then Republicans will try it again.
The President told his supporters to march on the Capitol and "show strength," they broke in, and tried to stop the counting of votes to overturn the results of the election. And Democratic leaders want to do ... nothing? I try not to curse here, but ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
Bitcoiners are taking a victory lap because its price is back to where it was three years ago. This supposedly proves that it's a better store of value than other assets that don't regularly experience extreme volatility.
It's worth pointing out, though, that the original pro-bitcoin arguments people were making years ago—either that it was a superior payment system, or that it would actually replace fiat currencies—haven't and won't come true.
If bitcoin really was going to change the world, it'd be in the middle of exponential growth right now. Instead, the number of transactions it's used for each day hasn't increased in the last three years.
If Joe Biden picks Janet Yellen as his Treasury Secretary, she will be the only person to have ever held all three of the most important economic policymaking positions in government: Fed Chair, CEA Chair, and Treasury Secretary.
G. William Miller is the only person right now to have been both Fed Chair & Treasury Secretary. Both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke were CEA Chair before becoming Fed Chair.
Nobody has done the trifecta, though. At least not yet...
I like to imagine that Janet Yellen and her husband George Akerlof debate which of them has a more impressive CV. First female Fed Chair, and potentially the first female Treasury Secretary too vs the Nobel Prize in Economics.