| The fed was able to maintain a functioning economy without major disruption in essentials (i.e. there weren't major shocks in being able to buy food or maintain housing) despite shutting down or significantly modifying large sections of the economy for a significant time. They aren't "trapped" this is the natural and expected consequence of creating a lot more money to sidestep a temporary condition. Considering the US is the strongest-ish economy in the world and the rest of the world had to do the same thing, there shouldn't be terrible consequences as long as nobody does anything really stupid. Bitcoin, gold, and anti-fed fanboys have a tendency to have a poor understanding at best of global economics with very basic misunderstandings like thinking that bumping the rate bumps the rates of all previous bonds. Some people who do advocate for those things do know what they are talking about and can argue valid points which are up for discussion, but you don't actually see those very often. Monetary policy in the US has made major mistakes, but it has been doing a pretty good job, and importantly has avoided the worst kinds of disaster for a long time. What it did during covid was essentially the only option, what a gold standard economy would have been able to do would have led to much worse outcomes. People will complain about anything. The HN crowd generally overestimates its expertise in matters not related to startup tech (i.e. physics, engineering, economics posts often have pretty awful comments) |
Discussion on this post is worse than the usual level of discussion here, and the usual level around these topics isn't great at best. Hard to discuss monetary policy with someone who doesn't know what monetary policy actually is.