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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

      Nobody votes *for* anything anymore, only against. It’s a bit like politics has entered the equivalent of the zero-loser-bound/liquidity trap regime in economics. To act like you know what’s going on is to set a nonzero interest rate.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1205381955576926210 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      One way to interpret political outcomes in the great weirding is that people seem to vote against candidates who act like they know what’s going on.
      8 replies 17 retweets 96 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      Damn this analogy has legs. Since nobody actually has a clue, any credible political plan can on,y offer so low an “interest rate” that people prefer to hold on to their political agency by voting for “liquidity trap politicians” who offer either no plan or obvious nonsense.

      1 reply 3 retweets 12 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      It’s a useless analogy though since nobody has really solved the economics version of the problem either. QE just pushed up stock prices without meaningfully stimulating the economy. Buying bonds without reference to interest rate is basically taking a country “private”.

      1 reply 2 retweets 8 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      So my theory of economic side of analogy. Approaching ZLB means fundamental growth has stalled, prompting... ...QE to start taking a country private so you can pretend it still has a future... ...which allows its stock market to become solipsistic, its own reality

      1 reply 2 retweets 13 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      Effectively causing economic agency to at once become further concentrated with incumbents AND divorced from reality in a country whose economic future has been taken private by its central bank Damn, I think I understand what happened in recession aftermath for the first time😳

      1 reply 2 retweets 10 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      The power of the liquidity trap is diluted (heh!) by creating MORE liquidity and giving it to the central bank’s best buddies who pass it on to their best buddies to buyback stock. So nobody knows where future growth will come from, but make sure The Cronies hold all assets.

      1 reply 3 retweets 6 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Dec 2019
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      This devalues cash holdings even if it’s under your mattress but you don’t notice because it takes the form of non-monetary capital concentration rather than visible consumption inflation. Or inflation being constrained to stock prices... by design. I think I finally get it 🤔

      1 reply 1 retweet 11 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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      Applying this to politics, voting against anyone with a plan creates a political agency liquidity trap. It’s all held in reserve, none of it deployed behind meaningful policy ideas. Tightening immigration is political QE: taking the country private by buying bonds.

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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      And the equivalent of stock buyback is just plain nativism 😝 Pushing up the “stock price” of “citizens” regardless of their fundamentals. Same result: political agency concentrated in incumbency absent any bright ideas about where to invest it.

      12:03 AM - 13 Dec 2019
      • 7 Likes
      • Rahul Ramchandani @micahstubbs stupid twitt account __, (25 second attention span) Johannes "xmj" Meixner Rik, but unironically. shi buyuan / billowing grinds
      2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          Well some progress. I’ve discovered that politics and economics are being fearful and unimaginative in exactly the same way, in tight synchronization.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          How come nobody ELI5ed this to me this way before? I’m either missing something or there’s a conspiracy of silence around the narrative here because it is so depressing.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          QE is basically a judo move executed by a central bank against the citizenry of its own country by using their own fears to weaken their stake further, by surreptitiously debasing the currency. “Oh you don’t believe enough to invest? We’ll buyback whatever investments you have”

          2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2019
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          Edit: In this analogy, a vacuous meme like MAGA is probably like a riskier long-term bond being bought in QE ops. Immigration tightening is the stock buyback that results as a second order effect.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        6. End of conversation
        1. Johannes "xmj" Meixner‏ @xmjEE 13 Dec 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Close. Think public good -> club good. Turns out that yes border protection agencies can be used to enforce exclusion (and, exclusivity). This is by design (why else fund them) but hasn't been enforced in a while.

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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