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by kneebonian 1186 days ago
A healthy economy has ups and downs, and if you have a bigger up there needs to be a corresponding down. In 2008 we made major decisions to prevent a needed correction down, it turns out all that did was kick the can down the road, and if we kick it down the road again we're just in for another problem.
2 comments

You're applying proverbial thinking to an extremely complex, emergent system. The reality is that many aspects of the economy can be manipulated, but the consequences of doing (or not doing) anything never completely clear. People are constantly pointing to indicators that they feel are signs of the apocalypse, the excess of central bank activism, or the ineptitude of politicians to enact fiscal policy. Out of a million different assertions, some of them are going to eventually be right.
Overly simplistic and just not true. There is nothing in observed or theoretical economics that says every “up” has to be exactly balanced by a same sized “down”. We would never get anywhere in aggregate if that was the case - net zero is clearly not what has happened over the last 100+ years.