You know, my brain's wheels are turning right now with a thought:
"Is an inflationary money policy the driver behind the desire to endlessly consume?"
Yes.
Our financial system depends on perpetual growth. Since all money is debt-based, we are always creating more of it to service the interest from having borrowed it into existence. If all debts were to be paid off simultaneously, there wouldn't be enough money in the world to actually do it. So we keep creating more. This is monetary inflation, which eventually leads to price inflation
unless you monetize more goods, meaning you make more things available for purchase for the newly created money, thereby balancing out supply & demand and preventing price inflation.
We are being driven towards endless consumption in order to perpetuate the status quo. We are always to be two missed paychecks from destitution so we will latch onto any false form of material happiness marketed towards our fears and frustrations.
Remember this the next time some smug douchebag pulls the "muh EnErGy cOnSumpTIon" card against Bitcoin. Deflationary crypto may yet be the biggest boon for the environment. It turns people from consumers into hodlers.
<some snip>What the Fed doesn't seem to grasp is, all the free stimmy checks or even UBI in the world won't make a lasting turn in consumer spending. Stimmies are just a temporary bump. Only wages going back up relative to *real* inflation will do that. And that just ain't gonna happen.
What the Fed is doing now (sending money directly to consumers) smacks of desperation. It's a joke.
yes, I agree, but what can they do if, according to Jeff Booth, we are living in a deflationary world?
I read "The price of tomorrow"..it's pretty compelling.
They could rip off the band-aid, taper the money printing, and raise interest rates to 5%+. Let the markets bubble deflate back to normal.
They sooner they do that, the sooner we get it over with and begin to build anew again.
Sure in the interim, millions around the world will lose their jobs, millions more will likely die.
But that's no who the Fed is protecting, although they would say they are.
It's all of their billionaire crony friends who, overnight, would all become merely millionaires. And that can't happen.
THAT'S who the Fed is protecting.