Negative Rate Madness
"The two-headed aliens come all the time. I kill them with my zapper gun.""Oh...I've never seen any aliens.""Of course not, I kill them all.""I've never seen any dead aliens either.""They disappear when I zap them."
"When Apple introduced the first version in 2007 at $500, the blue-collar hourly compensation was $25.07. That would put the iPhone time price at 19.94 hours or 1,196 minutes."The iPhone 11 is $1,000 and is 120 times more powerful, [by my rough metric of the increase in the number of transistors in its CPU, gg], which would mean the comparable price is really $8.33 ($1,000 ÷ 120). Blue-collar hourly compensation today is around $32.06. The time-price today is 0.26 hours or around 16 minutes."The time price has decreased by 98.7%. The time required to buy one iPhone in 2007 will buy almost 75 today."
"One of the first equations we learn in Economics is:Nominal Interest Rate = Real Interest Rate + Inflation"If we assume the real interest rate is 3% and we have 3% inflation, then the nominal rate should be 6%."But what if we have negative inflation or deflation?"If the real rate is 3% and we have 3% deflation, then the nominal rate could be zero."If the real rate is 3% and we have 6% deflation, then the nominal rate would be negative 3%."The problem is people are mis-measuring inflation. People are trying to use money to measure money. They should be using time prices."Since 1980, on the average, time prices for our 50 foundational commodities have been falling around 3.4% a year. So if the real rate is 3.4%, then the nominal rate should be zero."Negative nominal interest rates could be perfectly rational."