Hacker News

The Life Cycle of Money

69 points by nanacnote ago | 14 comments

7777777phil |next [-]

One thing worth adding: the repo market underneath all of this is roughly $12.6 trillion in daily exposures, about $700B larger than previous estimates.

Since this is one of my favourite rabbit holes: Pozsar's inside money vs outside money framework is useful for understanding why the fragilities described here aren't just theoretical (1) More on the repo plumbing specifically (2).

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/pozsars-bretton-woods-iii-th...

(2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/repo-might-be-even-bigger-th...

xhrpost |root |parent [-]

I'll read more of the articles but very first bullet point raised my eyebrows

>Freezing Russian reserves in 2022 introduced confiscation risk to assets previously considered risk-free

Is this actually new? Didn't we freeze Iranian assets back in 1979? Wouldn't be surprised if there were other examples.

0sdi |next |previous [-]

I find Richard Werner's take on money one of the most grounded. He has done a lot of work to track how it moves in the pipes. He has done a lot of communication around the subject, that one can find easily. The same guy that is said to have invented QE.

DevelopingElk |next |previous [-]

This is written by an LLM account. My guess is this article was created with some human guidance too, but the profile shows LLM patterns.

lukifer |root |parent [-]

The fascinating paradox: there are clearly "tells" (slop-smells, like code-smells?) of LLM-generated text. We're all developing heuristics rapidly, which probably pass a Pepsi challenge 95+% of the time.

And yet: LLMs are writing entirely based on human input. Presumably there exists a great quantity of median representative text, some lowest-common denominator, of humans who write similarly to these heuristics.

(In particular: why are LLMs so fond of em-dashes, when I'm not sure I've ever seen them used in the wilds of the internet?)

skybrian |next |previous [-]

Not an expert, but amazingly this all looks correct?

xalava |root |parent |next [-]

If it looks correct, it must be then.

More seriously, if you want to learn money and its infrastructure, I recommend Banque de France's book on the matter "Payments and market infrastructures in the digital era" https://www.banque-france.fr/system/files/2023-04/payments_m...

atq2119 |root |parent |previous [-]

Looks like it, yes. It's encouraging given that so many discussions of these topics online are wrong. The explanation of constraints on bank lending in particular is something many people should read.

kelseyfrog |next |previous [-]

The article is adamant that "this is not printing money," and then gives very technical explanations that are honestly difficult to untangle.

My question is, what would a "printing money" look like, hypothetically? I feel like comparing the real to the hypothetical would help me understand the difference by highlighting the contrast.

fuoqi |root |parent |next [-]

>The article is adamant that "this is not printing money," and then gives very technical explanations that are honestly difficult to untangle.

Because it's BS. In the modern fiat system the most basic form of money printing is expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. It creates the "base money". Sure, technically the government issues debt to "borrow" the new money, but everyone familiar with the system understands the the debt will never be paid out in the classical sense and it will be just re-financed by future expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. So the end effect is the same: new units of the base money enter circulation contributing to inflation.

But there are other forms of "money printing" as well. Every time a bank issues a credit, in a certain sense, it also "prints money". As long as the bank system functions as usual, it's indistinguishable from the printing done by the government+central bank. This is why bank de-regulation can have the same effects as the classical money printing, but with additional risks of potential credit contraction caused by bad loans (though they are minimized by central banks more often than not...).

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tekla |root |parent |previous [-]

I think the problem here is the idea of what money means varies so much

Printing money, in the "normative" sense is printing pieces of paper that has a certain picture and number on it and thats about it.

When the US treasury "prints money", its issuing debt. Yes the money supply increases, but its backed by "something", rather than "just" toilet paper with pictures and number on it.

solarity_studio |previous [-]

Without reading it, this is written by ai

readthenotes1 |root |parent [-]

If it's correct and clear, why does the gender of the author matter?