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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Micro or macro? If macro, can you explain what it means that M1 and M2 money supply has been FALLING? Most of the pundits seem to be saying "nothing to see here", whereas the stopped clocks are saying it's a harbinger of recession.

That just means V is up. During COVID the Fed flooded the market with liquidity but my guess is a lot of that was semi trapped in interest on excess reserves.

By the same token during COVID you would have expected far more inflation based off of base money growth.

I preferred Micro. If I had any specialty it would have been public choice.

Macro is dark wizardy

If you like public choice, then you like would’ve enjoyed law and economics.

They had some overlap for sure. The law and econ stuff sometimes got too close to straight philosophy for my taste. Public choice was ultimately grounded in making predictions about politicians and political outcomes.

Perhaps but L&E ended up rather accurately “backing into” common law rules that evolved over time. It definetly made me think “this framework is prettt strong”

It's hard to tell if they backed into those rules, or they created a path to get to those rules. It's kind of like evolutionary psychology, where you can tell a just so story to fit what you observe. There isn't much new psychology evolving so it's hard to know how much predictive ability it has. Likewise there isn't much common law arising these days.

Public choice has at least one area where it can be repeatedly tested: elections.

Good god, it's been a while since I've cracked open my econ degree.

TLDR, M1 and M2 are basically how much free-flow, readily available cash is in the hands of the public(as opposed to Banks, the federal deposit, and other entities.)

Or, put another way, how much money do civilians and John Q Public have available at quick notice.

If it's been falling, well... that means they have less cash on-hand. Why that is could be due to... well, a long list of reasons.

Also, that redefinition of m1 annoys me to a horrendous degree for some odd reason.

The M1 redefinition makes estimating models annoying too, although M3 is a good enough measure nowadays given how liquid even savings accounts and GICs are.

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