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Re:Unsolved problems in economics by boppo1 on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @09:00PM (#31418089)
Well I'm not the other guy, and I don't think there's any sort of "seekrit society with the elites". But having done undergrad study of finance, it seems like there's a sort of "ideological capture" in the field of economics. I have never had anyone explain to me why interest rate intervention doesn't fundamentally undermine the quality of work we're doing (giving businesses loans they shouldn't be able to afford means we're wasting effort). All the economists just agree it's totally okay based on less than 100 years of data, which, IMO isn't long enough to really observe the policy effects.

Suppose you open a spreadsheet right now, discount 100 years of cash flows, and measure each cash flow as a % contribution to the sum (aka npv). You will find that at medium to higher rates years 0-20 make up the greatest percentage of the npv by far. But as you lower them, that relationship flips and cash flows for years 20 to 100 become the lion's share of the valuation. Pretty sure this is how we wound up with WeWork and all the similar fiascos, meanwhile huge swaths of the capable working-age population has dropped out of society for lack of well-compensated opportunity. Hell, there's a lot of issues right now that seem pretty easily explained with a simple DCF interpretation.

All I ever seem to get is "lowering interest rates gets the economy rolling again by allowing businesses to continue hiring, and even if those jobs are just digging & filling in holes, those people have to buy food and housing and stuff so it gets the economy rolling again!" But that doesn't explain what happens if you "get it rolling again" too many times and the ratio of hole-diggers to food-makers starts to approach 1/2 (or wherever a "tipping point" may be). Hey great! Low unemployment! Except what's actually getting done is worthless.

Is there such a thing as the 'natural interest rate' in economics? A way to determine what the yield curve would be if we hadn't been intervening for the last half a century?

Re:Unsolved problems in economics by Aunche on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @10:01PM (#31418465)
I don't understand what your DCF example is supposed to illustrate. A higher interest rate also enables wealthier people to stay wealthy without doing anything. Meanwhile, Wework and similarly useless companies circulate wealthy investor's money into regular people's pockets by renting out office spaces at a loss.

For the most part, I don't think low interest rates are a bad thing (though I don't think that they should have ended quantitative tightening prematurely in 2019). I share your sentiment that too much money is circulating around, but I don't blame the Fed. They have no way to stop Wework from receiving cheap cash without hurting useful small businesses. IMO, if Congress weren't so bad at balancing a budget, the government wouldn't have to issue so much debt, and in turn the Fed wouldn't have to buy so much of it back to achieve a similar effect with QE.