Bobby. wrote on Aug 24^th, 2025 at 10:38am:


Oz and the US are 'Western countries', with inflation now in the preferred 2-3% range.

What is your defintion of "out of control"?

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Ah - I note your 'fake news' approach to the official inflation stats....cool.....

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Already addressed (you are proving to be uneducable):

Episodes of past inflation caused by market failure or government mismagement (or both) result in loss of money's purchasing power if wages don't increase enough to restore purchasing power to the pre inflation-episode levels.

Housing prices are going up in Oz because of market failure (high demand for housing in an overpriced market distorted by tax policies favouring home ownership) causing inflation in the housing sector.

Food prices have stabilized  (as with many other sectors):

(google)

Recent Trends (June Quarter 2025)

Quarterly Increase: Food and non-alcoholic beverages increased by 1.0% in the three months to June 2025.
Annual Increase: Over the 12 months to the June 2025 quarter, these prices rose by 2.1%.

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QE describes the central bank increasing bank reserves, which  doesn't cause inflation unless borrowers flock to banks  to borrow money regardless of their ability to pay. The attempt to stimulate the economy via QE didn't work during the GFC because no-one wanted to borrow money (due to high unemployment and mortgage stress cause by the 'subprime'  fiasco in the US.

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Already addressed, you are proving to be uneducable - or  unwilling to read and addrees the points made.

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Partly correct:  the US is borrowing money to ensure economic growth, while reducing taxes to grow the economy - hence the US is the fastest-growing G7 economy, with low inflation despite its growing debt.

Jerome Powell has confirmed he will lower interest rates in September to increase  growth in the economy (pleasing Trump and the stock market), provided Trump's tariffs don't start pushing up prices. (Stay tuned: some black clouds are indeed emerging on the tariff front).


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That's what the US government SHOULD do (or rather, the durrency-issuing govt shouldn't borrow at all), rather than selling bonds to rich people (bonds which have to repaid with interest); eventually the interest payments will surpass military spending.   

Indeed the US CAN and should  'print money', but they choose to indebt the government  to rich people who want to buy risk free government bonds.

[My observation: Part of the problem with your thinking  relates to a refusal to consider the public sector's role in economic growth, and the non-market inflation control tools available to government, other than control by an independent central bank.]

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Already addressed; the gold standard is no longer relevant.

TGD,
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The US is printing money out of pure desperation because they
know their whole fake house of cards is on the brink of collapse.
While the $US is the reserve currency they will get away with it for a bit longer
but not if most other countries use other currencies as their reserve.

That is what the BRICS nations are trying to do:

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.

Bobby. wrote on Aug 24^th, 2025 at 10:18pm:


Wrong again: the US is borrowing printed money which "must be repaid" to US citizens, as opposed to "printing money" for the public sector for free - which is what the US SHOULD be doing, to ensure it can maintain a minimal degree of social harmony (pity about the homeless, but they are only a small minority...and Trump can send in the national  guard...) while spending as much on defence as the next 10 nations combined - AND reducing taxation.

The US won't collapse unless Chinese science eventually enables  the PLA to tell the Pentagon where to go....not likely in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile , it's pathetic to see Trump defunding research, and vital spending like overseas aid and Medicaid, driven by obsolete 'balanced government budget mythology; c-i governments need to manage resource allocation and development, including via the non-market economy, rather than managing  financial budgets (like you and I must do).

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Yes, and addressed above. The US is actually growing faster than China post covid at present, because the US is deficit spending way beyond China's level and the BRICS levels).   

Luckily for the US, China's leading  economists  (at the PBofC) are also mainstream 'balanced-budget', Harvard-educated fools, who can't work out how to use China's tremendous industrial "over-capacity" to benefit Chinese consumers, in the face of Western tariffs on Chinese goods.... hence the high youth unemployment and DE-flation in China caused by the US 'decoupling' from  and containment of China.

Daves2017 wrote on Aug 25^th, 2025 at 11:44pm:


Provided you can afford to lose money,  if the market goes thge wrong way.

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Here is MMT prof. Bill Mitchell's latest article on digital currencies:

https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=62736

Cryptocurrencies are not currencies
August 25, 2025

You will find it an interesting read.

As to "disruptive to MMT": MMT sowed the seeds of its own rejection by post-Keynesian economists promoting  [i]free-enterprise, "invisible hand" free market dogmas including "other peoples' money", because MMTers did not develop non-market inflation control methods.

Hence leading to mainstream accusations (like Booby's) that  "printing money will cause inflation".

MMT didn't consider non-market inflation control tools because MMT's  founders were bankers or academics in the free enterprise world.   

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Thanks.

Re Bobby's and Ray Dalio's government debt concerns: currency-issuing governments shouldn't issue debt (ie. borrow money) at all.

Their task is to ensure public sector spending doesn't cause inflation. 

'Independent' central bank  tools  - aka monetary policy - are not suitable for public sector inflation control, because the public sector's task is different to the private sector's task (which is to incentivize profit-seeking creativity among individuals competing for private wealth accumulation), and should  ensure housing, education, work skills, and employment for all (regardless of the private sector business cycle) - goals which are impossible for the private sector to achieve.

Therefore central banks should not be independent of government which should oversee mandated full employment and zero central bank interest rates, as part of ensuring effective operations in both sectors.

.....

Meanwhile prof Steve Keen  is working  to relieve the mainstream of their government debt delusions: 

New YouTube video explaining government money creation to Ray Dalio
Both Government and Private Debt Create Money

Steve Keen
Aug 25


"The sequel to my very popular video on what Ray Dalio gets right about credit is now up on YouTube":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2kRVQaTPRc

"I’ll do a more detailed video soon on what economists don’t understand about money, which is the root cause of the paranoia that people like Ray have about government debt".

Meanwhile reports that France might be forced to go to the IMF for a  'bailout',  due to its government debt, are making news in Europe. Certainly France is now facing political chaos, if not actual financial chaos.

Meanwhile mainstream economists are content to trash democracy, rather than  ensure the essentials for all.

More political disillusionment - in  the UK as well as France - caused by the mainstream's paranoia re government debt, and the resulting rise of populist parties:

(Daily Mirror)

Labour sinks to its lowest poll rating in six years - as Reform UK enjoys eight-point lead

Sir Keir Starmer has been dealt another blow after Labour's popularity was revealed to have sunk to its lowest level in six years.

A YouGov poll, published while the Prime Minister enjoys a family holiday abroad, showed just 20 per cent of voters would back Labour at a general election.

This is both the party's worst result since Sir Keir took office and their lowest rating since 2019.

Reform UK were shown to hold an eight-point lead over Labour, with Nigel Farage's party backed by 28 per cent of voters.

Meanwhile, the Tories were on 17 per cent, one point ahead of the Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent, and the Green Party was supported by 11 per cent of respondents.

It came as Labour stepped up its attacks on Reform today, although a senior minister denied the party is 'running scared' of Mr Farage's outfit.

Ahead of a Westminster speech in which he repeatedly hit out at Mr Farage, Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds acknowledged the Labour Government viewed Reform as the 'real opposition' ahead the Tories.

'At the moment that is the case because the Conservatives are essentially, they're like a party that has simply nothing to say, they're not on the pitch,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

....

That's correct: the mainstream Conservatives are irrelevent, but the so-called 'progressive' UK Labour party is also rendered useless, as Reeves tries to 'balance the budget'  - hence Labour's  rapidly evaporating vote, crippled by the need to raise taxes (which is politically toxic) or reduce spending, which hurts the lower half of the population.

Re the feud over the "independence" of the reserve bank, and the US (read Trump) government's rejection of this "independence:

(Raw Story)

JD Vance just said the 'quiet part out loud' in Trump's escalating feud: analyst

The government's view:

Vance later shared the White House's viewpoint on the Fed.

"Isn’t it a little preposterous to say that the president of the United States — the elected president of the United States, working of course in concert with Congress — doesn’t have the ability to make these determinations? I don’t think that we allow bureaucrats to sit from on high and make decisions about monetary policy and interest rates without any input from the people that were elected to serve the American people."

cf. the economic mainstream's view:

On Friday, Steve Benen, a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show" and editor of MaddowBlog, flagged recent remarks from Trump's No. 2 about Cook's ouster, which Benen found revealing.

Benen noted it should be "obvious" why the Fed is largely independent and "makes its own decisions about interest rates: It’s because politicians are really bad at it."

"The whole point of removing partisan, electoral and political considerations from the process is because, in some instances, it’s necessary to deliberately slow economic growth in order to address broader concerns about problems such as inflation. But because elected officials, who fear a backlash from voters, are always going to be reluctant to make the economy worse on purpose, our system puts these decisions in the hands of Senate-confirmed professionals at the Fed," he wrote.

Benen concluded that Trump either wants to "bully them into submission or replace them with knee-jerk loyalists" so he can boost economic growth regardless of the long-term repercussions.

.......

The flaws in the mainstream view presented by Bennen are numerous:

1. "Politicians are really bad at setting interest rates" - why?

Because pollies "don't like slowing the economy to...... control inflation".

Yet mainstream economists supporting the 'invisible hand' free markets ARE ok with raising interest rates to "slow the economy", regardless of the higher unemployment, and transfer of wealth from poor borrowers to rich savers resulting from higher interest rates.  Obviously mainstream economists won't be the ones losing their jobs in a deliberately-engineered downturn.

2.  "Elected officials will always fear a backlash from the public", and are therefore "reluctant to make the economy worse on purpose." 

...surely pointing a systemic failure of Neoclassical economics: why must the economy be made worse, to control inflation?

Deplorable mainstream economics.