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How come we experience so much more inflation than deflation? in other words, why does our buying power decrease far more often than it increases?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Everyone seems to be missing the most dangerous part of deflation: If prices fall year over year, collateralize credit becomes incredibly unstable. If you borrow a million dollars from the bank to build a house and then in five years that house is worth half a million...well you would be stupid not to walk away for your loan and leave the bank with a half million dollar hole in its balance sheet. If the whole market does this consistently year after year then banking becomes impossible and the whole system collapses. Weve had this happen before, such as during the Great Depression and very briefly during other market crashes like in 2008. If a central bank has to choose between inflation and deflation, they will choose inflation every time.
So you're saying that deflation hurts the banks? Oh no! Not the banks!
Fuck regular people, right? A home is obviously an investment first and shelter second. Why would anyone need a home to live in, if they can just rent it out for obscene amounts of money, because banks have to have infinite profits?
It doesnt hurt the banks, it destroys them. The modern economy is unable to function without banks. I suppose if you were in favor of entirely destroying the modern economic system, long term deflation would be the easiest way to do it. Dont expect some sort of socialist utopia to come out the other side though. Last time we had a serious deflationary run we ended up with a handful of obscenely wealthy robber barons and a world war.
Should we at least, differentiate deflation due to technologies, deflation due to stagnant economy and "price slashing" and those desperation crimes?
We should acknowledge deflation due to technology, right?
Couple it with no "passive income" pumping money for the "rich reservoirs", overall prices gets cheaper in line with everyone's active earning? (All it takes is remove the "passive income economy" that generates nothing but "financing". Tax/donations does the same, without interest being created?
Yes, companies can save money because one person with a computer can replace a whole pool of secretaries or a room full of people doing mathematical calculation. You can buy a whole wardrobe of full of clothes for what a few outfits might have cost before, thanks to automation and cheap foreign labor. Weve seen quite a bit of that in the last 50 years. It means you can buy all the mass produced plastic crap you want, but you cant afford a house to put it in. And it has resulted in a MASSIVE boost in wealth equality, its just that it was a global phenomenon and it was the poor people in places like India and China that experienced it.
There's a difference between sitting on a house for a decade to sell it at 10x the price and the simple fact that the builder of a house needs to make a profit over the cost of building it
I don't understand much. What so bad about house losing value, if we never intended it as capitalistic investment?
Everything suppose to be "utilitarian" basis instead of ever-inflating "profit" basis that hurt majority, no?
Just my curiosity why deflation is a bad thing, other than monetary incentive system broke down and no one working (right now, monetary system still broke down on opposite spectrum due to purchasing power collapse, I assume?)
Edit: clarification
Profitable or not, a house is a shelter, not renting or trading item? (This is what I meant by capitalistic mindset, not about corporation, but the very profit mindset of human.)
Edit2: clarification2
Yes, same opinion on investment and passive income. All capitalistic nature. Impossible to earn passively unless someone or some machine enslaved, right? Yet everyone love passive income idea so much, pumping profit everywhere, more money more inflation, no? In the past, people might save years to a house, now, people earn endless passive income to no house, I think that's the very reason to it. Passive income is somehow bad. (Not to be mixed with voluntary welfare system, passive income is auto sucking involuntarily, iinm)
Edit3: clarification3
So about the house worth dropping. In bookkeeping, historical cost don't drop. However, future value inflation exist thanks to "profit future inflation". So, we still have to settle book value of loan, I don't get it how the value dropped though? A liability is a liability, not to be messed with "~~inflating~~ fluctuating market value", no?
Im not sure what you are trying to say exactly. If you are running your responses through a translator you might try using smaller words so more of the meaning comes through.
Say you owe the bank roughly a million dollars and the house is only worth half a million. If you continue to pay the bank, you are paying double price for your house, plus interest. If you defaulted on the loan you could show up at the bank auction in a fake mustache and get it for half price. There are people out there who would work themselves to death to pay their mortgage because they see it as their sacred duty to the bank. Those people are suckers, and they end up very poor in this scenario.
Now keep in mind that this isnt just house prices were talking about. Stock prices, salaries, food, land, machines, fuel, clothing, vehicles, every month the price of all of it goes down and the value of little slips of paper goes up. This is the ultimate passive income. If you are rich you cash out everything, put your paper in a vault and each month you become richer. There no investment, no economic growth, no liquidity. The economy strangles to death while the people with all the paper control everything thats left.
This is the dream of all the gold, silver, crypto bugs trying to create deflationary currency. They figure they can stockpile enough of the new currency now and come out the other end of the disaster as the new owners of everything.
Even if the value of money goes up, it's by a paltry 1-2% and it still wouldn't seem to make sense to hoard rather than invest, unless I'm missing something. In what scenario would any rich person just sit on their money? Likewise, the impact of 2% deflation on a bank loan is well within the variance in rates we see today, and I imagine in such an economy the rates would be adjusted somewhat to compensate.
Simply put, the difference between an inflating vs deflating currency doesn't seem enough to drastically alter people's behavior. In the short to medium term it seems almost a non-issue, at least for regular people, and in the long term people won't get fucked out of their life savings. I imagine the vast majority of the population doesn't invest their money. Which policy would they prefer?
Tiny short term changes either way will not be enough to drastically alter people's behavior. If those changes are long term and predictable they will absolutely change people's behavior. 2% may not be much year over year, but over a 30 year mortgage you can expect to take a bath on any house you buy, even with 1% interest rate. And people, rich and poor, do horde cash when they think that returns are going to become negative. In a very mildly deflationary world this happens much more often than in an inflationary one.
Just thought you'd want to know that you probably meant "hoard" as in "accumulate (money or valued objects) and hide or store away" instead of horde, which is a crowd or equivalent.
Let me try understand this.
Material cost or anything spent never change? We can't regret buying expensive computers in past? Everything, even if loan. Loan only default on bankruptcy, "no property ownership ban"? Do people want that?
Incentive of "profit" system. Until it backfires with overloaded money. Active income generate economy of production + money. Passive income skip production, overloaded money, inflation. Without profit system, big projects can only funded by slower tax/donations. But no one creating extra profit/inflation.
So you now get my point? Deflation happens because of good automation (slaving machine). Stopping passive income investment stops inflation. While waiting new automation, things get lesser labour and no inflation to demand additional income.
Where's the loophole in my opinion?
I agree, itβs only natural a house would decrease in value after itβs been built. Just like cars or anything else. You could mitigate that by renovating etc of course.
Thats depreciation, not deflation.
Well yes. I have a cold and canβt think but I mean inflation makes the price go the other way.
It's almost like endless profit is baked into the system. Guess I'll continue never owning anything and generational wealth will be the only wealth left soon