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Economics

拜登空洞的通胀说辞

Jun 20, 2022 Michael R. Strain

华盛顿特区—针对飙升的物价，美国总统拜登本月宣布“对抗通胀”是他的“首要经济任务”。他承诺政府“将继续竭尽所能为美国人民降低价格”。然而，尽管做出了这样的承诺声明，拜登仍拒绝取消特朗普政府对中国进口商品征收的关税。

消费物价正以四年来最快的速度增长。仅 5 月份，消费物价指数就上涨了 1%，比一年前的水平高出 8.6%。问题不仅仅是食品和能源价格上涨。尽管剔除了这些因素的核心通胀没有加速，但仍处于高位，没有下降，这表明通胀在整个经济中根深蒂固。

2021 年 3 月通过的拜登政府的 1.9 万亿美元刺激计划刺激消费需求远远超出了经济生产能力，推动了消费物价大幅上涨。现在，引导经济回到低而稳的通胀环境的任务在很大程度上落到了美联储的肩上。

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 8 Comments on this article

Kurt Kristensen Jun 21, 2022

The author has a strong point that "To be sure, concerns about China are legitimate. But the current tariff regime has to go. Protectionism that hurts US companies and raises prices for consumers is ineffective and harmful. Instead, the administration should focus its efforts on stopping the forced transfer of technology from US companies, leading a serious multilateral effort to compel China to comply with international law and norms, and taking additional steps to establish American economic leadership in the Pacific region. And it should increase support for basic research, so that the US can continue to out-innovate China." Perhaps it is past due time to make students from China ineligible for enrollment at US Graduate schools. The 'transfer' of US technology to China has been an open door for 50 years with Chinese students serving as transfer agents to China's corporations and China's 'closed' political powers.
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vic lai Jun 21, 2022

The one-bigger-and-bigger-size-fits-all interest rate hiking cycle to be implemented by the US Fed in the coming quarters will, like Japan in the early 1990s, pop the beautiful asset market bubbles now prevailing in the US virtual economy (just ask those bitcoin "investors"), thereby
(i) increasing the chance of pushing the US economy into a recession in the near future, and
(ii) disarming the Wall Street's coming ability, with the help of near-the-mountain-top US dollar DXY, to buy out the rest of the world.
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The Fed can alleviate the collateral damage, and reduce the magnitude, of her coming interest-rate hiking cycle, by an appropriate use of her accompanying QT cycles.
Through both a further relaxation of the Debt Ceiling imposed by the Congress and the use of Yield Curve Control (YYC), much more longer-duration government treasuries can be issued by the Federal Government in the coming quarters, even though her current TGA savings account at the Fed is still full of money (a result of recent tax collections), to induce the macroeconomy's non-bank excess circulating liquidity (reflected by more than US$2 trillion now at the Fed's ONRRP account) to be transferred to the Federal Government's coffer, so as to mitigate the current rising inflationary pressure in the domestic economy.
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The YCC will steepen the treasury yield curve, and so
(a) preventing the treasury yield curve from further flattening or reversing,
(b) inducing the country's commercial banks to keep financing the US household's buying and refinancing of their own houses in the future, thereby reducing also the rate of rise of the country's housing rents,
(c) encouraging the commercial banks to also increase their lending to the
non-house real sector, to enable the domestic corporations, especially the SMEs, to provide more jobs in the future, and
(d) accelerating the repatriation of Eurodollars back to the US, further strengthening the US dollar DXY.
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- vic lai Jun 21, 2022
  
  Today, with an interest-rate-rising global environment, is no longer the best time for a central government to raise massive cash in the market to help develop her country's various kinds of necessary projects.
  The past decade, with very low or even negative interest rates and yield curves prevailing in the global bond markets which had constantly been screaming and begging us to borrow, should be the best time for a country to borrow money en masse to help finance further renovation and construction of their own domestic economies.
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  But thanks to the over-issuance of money by both the US and the EU to cope with the aftermath of the global pandemic, the world's private markets are now once again flushed with too much money, causing inflation in these advanced countries, requiring their central governments and their central banks to work together to sterilize the extra market liquidity in order to rein in inflation.
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  The issuance of more longer-duration treasuries by the US Federal Government suggested upstairs, can be enacted ambitiously and "vote-buyingly" by President Biden, under the guidance of a Grand Scheme, resembling the NextGenerationEU project recently proposed by the EU, which is "more than a recovery plan – it is a once in a lifetime chance to emerge stronger from the pandemic, transform our economies and societies, and design a Europe that works for everyone."
  My suggestion is simply an evening-out of the massive spending power concentrated in today's macroeconomy over a long period of time, like the use of accounting amortization or spreading out of today's total purchasing power into the far future.
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  - vic lai Jun 21, 2022
    
    Will the resulting ever-rising heavy debts of both the US and the EU bankrupt their countries one day in the future ?
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    No, if the debts are used productively by their central governments to increase the overall competitiveness of their own countries vis-a-vis other competing countries, like China.
    This way, the total debt/GDP ratios of both the US and the EU will gradually drop overtime, not once again due to more money printing by their central banks to monetize the debts in an inflation-prone manner, but due to healthy and quicker GDP growth overtime, resembling the 2 decades following the end of WWII at which the western European countries were still highly indebted before US's Marshall Plan.
    In other words, contrary to popular worry, their debts will take care of themselves as time goes by.
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    Today's socialist China is incurring more and more debts to accelerate the further construction of her own macroeconomy, and so, "uncheating" capitalist US and EU will simply stand to lose in this prisoner-dilemma-like global (re-)construction game.
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    - vic lai Jun 22, 2022
      
      (A) Normally, if a carrot is hanged in front of the head of a stupid donkey, the animal will obediently pull the cart behind it forward, and keep running quite fast.
      This is nothing special and is more common than common sense.
      (B) Well, some people argue that the donkey should be taken away, the carrot should be put behind the cart, and let the vegetable push the cart forward.
      If this works, wow !
      --
      I'm not kidding.
      Now let's change the identities of the characters upstairs as follows :
      carrot ---> domestic consumption,
      donkey ---> really useful domestic real-economy investments, both public and private.
      cart ---> domestic GDP.
      I hope you now know what I want to say.
      --
      (A) has mainly been the situation in China, both today and in the past decades, and that's why the Chinese GDP has been rising quickly over the past decades, despite the fact that this country has had her special way of measuring her own GDPs in those years.
      (B) has more or less been the situation in the US (and in the EU as well), and so her GDP growth has been lagging behind.
      Today, it's time for the US to put the US donkey back to the racecourse, in order not for the US cart to be overtaken by the Chinese cart in the coming fierce chariot race.
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K Harris Jun 20, 2022

I am so terribly disappointed in this administration. They don’t seem to have a clue. I was very young during the Carter years but I clearly remember the financial pain my family experienced as well as the worry about being able to afford what we needed. It feels like that all over again except now it’s me trying to figure out how to pay for everything. It is irritating that the administration keeps telling us we just don’t understand how good we have it. There’s tone deaf and then there’s delusional.
- vic lai Jun 20, 2022
  
  Nothing new under the sun, especially for the older generation of people.
  ---
  The Republican candidate (Donald Trump ?) challenging Biden in the 2024 Presidential election can borrow from Reagan by saying,
  "Last night I had a dream and Joe Biden asked me why I want to do his job. And I said, I don't want to do your job ------ I want to do the job of a US President !"
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拜登空洞的通胀说辞

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