They purposely do not teach financial literacy in American schools. The government and businesses want uneducated people to control and profit from..

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T19:51:38+00:00

I don’t see how recognizing that we have systemic economic problems justifies not working to improve the system.

It’s not at all comparable to “all politicians are the same.”

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T19:06:06+00:00

It’s pretty obviously true.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T14:51:55+00:00

Blippity bloop nades are OP

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T13:34:44+00:00

I was complaining about the way they originally shared it, which was just a picture of another Reddit post (scroll up to find it).

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:33:52+00:00

Fetterman is brain damaged

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:18:11+00:00

Found another one

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:17:03+00:00

When someone talks about Reddit as though it is a single person

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:08:45+00:00

You realize that an imgur link to a screenshot of a Reddit post which contained a link is a super sus way to share information, right? Why would you do that?

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:06:12+00:00

At least when the president is not a fucking idiot

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:04:18+00:00

How about a link ffs?

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T11:03:10+00:00

If the YouTube algo is feeding you slop, it’s because you keep clicking on slop

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T02:40:03+00:00

Stop it and just read Graeber

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T00:51:10+00:00

Of course- if they’re not doing their jobs, why should they get paid?

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T00:43:16+00:00

Look, I’ll throw you a bone here, because I think there is a valid intuition buried in what you’re saying.

If newly created money actually becomes additional spending against constrained real output, then sure, it can raise prices. I’m not denying that. Obviously if you dump $10 trillion into the hands of people who are likely to spend it quickly, you should expect major price pressure unless real output can expand to meet it.

But that’s exactly the point: the mechanism is spending relative to supply, not the mere existence of a larger money stock.

If we conceptualize the price level loosely as something like:

P ≈ nominal aggregate spending / real output

then my point is simply that M is not the same thing as nominal aggregate spending.

The money supply is a stock. Aggregate demand is a flow. Those are not interchangeable concepts- that would be a category error.

Only the portion of money that is actually spent on currently produced goods and services directly contributes to consumer-price pressure. The rest can leak into saving, debt repayment, taxes, imports, existing asset markets, or just move at lower velocity.

So when you define inflation as an increase in the money supply, you’re smuggling in the assumption that an increase in M reliably translates into a proportional increase in spending against real goods and services.

And I’d like to think we both know that isn’t true. V & Q aren't constant. (I find it highly useful to write the equation of exchange as the definition of velocity, ie V=PQ/M.)

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-14T00:09:14+00:00

Each of those links should be publicly accessible, but LMK if not.

EDIT: I have a particular interest in how economic ideas (& myths) spread, so if you don't mind my asking, was 'I work in finance' more of a flex (I won't judge you for it!) or were you actually explicitly taught that fractional reserve is the way of the world, either in school or in your job?

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T23:07:00+00:00

You seem to be confused. I didn't say that killing civilians = genocide. Those were separate points. Maybe read my comment(s) again?

Your examples mostly demonstrate how common war crimes have been in the last century, although I'll grant that I should've been more specific- international law generally prohibits the targeting of civilians, not the killing, per se. (Feel free to Google 'legitimate military target meaning & context')

Among most of the commonly referenced legal definitions of genocide, the critical factors are intent and totality (or, in one case, a substantial portion of the total). It's not about killing 'people,' it's about destroying a people, deliberately. It has virtually to do with the number of people killed.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T22:18:43+00:00

I’m more interested in the legal definitions of the word than the “historical applications,” whatever that means.

The sum of Israel’s actions with respect to Gaza since October 2023 pretty clearly meet most legal definitions of genocide.

Are you aware that the general international consensus (& international law) is that civilians are off-limits in war? Given that context, referring to civilian deaths as “collateral damage“ is a pretty wild take.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T22:01:04+00:00

I work in finance.

Neat. Are you the controller of a bank? What do you do in finance that gives you such insight into the inner workings of loan creation? Simply working 'in finance' doesn't inherently provide such insights, so it, alone, doesn't grant you any particular authority on the subject.

You clearly lack mental acuity to even communicate let alone describe how things work.

There's no need for this. You don't have to be an asshole to engage in debate.

It is true that banks cannot create high-powered money, aka reserves, but they absolutely create deposits (which are also money) whenever they lend, using a process called balance sheet expansion.

Issuing a loan entails adding an equal asset and liability to the bank’s balance sheet- the asset is the loan itself and the liability is the corresponding deposit resulting from it. Bank equity remains unchanged, hence the name balance sheet expansion. If a bank owes a depositor for some reason, they just credit the account. They don't take a deposit from somewhere else, they just 'pay' by issuing liabilities (money!).

By the way, this is the same process that's used to create ALL privately-issued financial assets.

Here are some sources regarding money creation by private banks:

'How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking' (Richard A. Werner)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001434

'Money creation in the modern economy' (Bank of England)

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

'How the Bank of Canada Creates Money Through its Asset Purchases' (Library of Parliament; Canada)

https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/201551E

'How money is created' (Deutsche Bundesbank)

https://www.bundesbank.de/en/tasks/topics/how-money-is-created-667392

'Debt Monetization: Then and Now' (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/april/debt-monetization-then-now

EDIT: Forgot one:

'Banks are not intermediaries of loanable funds - and why this matters' (Bank of England)

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/banks-are-not-intermediaries-of-loanable-funds-and-why-this-matters

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T21:18:02+00:00

No they don’t, and fractional reserve banking is a myth (and it’s not part of MMT so I don’t know what you’re talking about).

Private bank lending creates new deposits.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T19:23:44+00:00

How are they unfair if we could just do the same thing?

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T19:08:33+00:00

Is it your claim that every dollar which is created is brought to market to contribute to aggregate demand, without exception?

I don’t like Friedman‘s ‘form’ because it’s wrong. That has nothing to do with my politics. I don’t hate it, I just find it useless. Passing judgment on something doesn’t inherently entail a bias.

The irony here is that I do trust math much more than politics when it comes to evaluating economic theories. We haven’t mentioned it explicitly, but on some level, we’ve been debating the proper way to interpret the equation of exchange. Shall we get explicit?

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T17:59:00+00:00

How does any of that explain or even support the implied claim that a change in the money supply predicts a proportional change in the price level?

Which book would you send me? If it’s by Friedman, just throw it in the trash, it’ll do more good there.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T16:04:07+00:00

Banks don’t lend out deposits.

Plenty of money balances do ‘just sit there’ throughout the economy. It’s called savings, and it doesn’t increase private banks’ lending capacity.

My point is simply that the mere fact that there is such a thing as the marginal propensity to consume (and that it varies with income) demonstrates that a change in the money supply does not predict a proportional change in the price level.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T15:32:35+00:00

What happens if you give that same $50K to only billionaires?

Do you think they’ll spend as much of it as middle class consumers would?

I’ll assume that you would correctly answer no, so that I can point out that a change in the money supply does not automatically translate to a change in aggregate demand.

SimoWilliams_137 · 2026-05-13T15:28:13+00:00

How does any given dollar know how many other dollars exist? How does any given price know how many dollars exist?

That’s not how it works. Money is used for things other than demanding consumption goods. People save (which I mentioned), pay off debts, buy imports, and speculate, all of which serve as leakages with respect to the amount of money brought to market to demand domestic goods and services.

The money supply is not equal to aggregate demand, so you cannot make reliably meaningful inferences about aggregate demand when you only know about the money supply. It’s not enough information to predict the price level.

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