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0 pointsRetric2mo ago0 comments

The US has never dealt with hyperinflation.

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The US isn't going to get hyperinflation. It's going to get a Japan style heat death. More and more wealth concentrated into low yielding debt, rather than invested into growth, while purchasing power is chewed up by persistent currency debasement. Japan never did suffer real deflation (that was a lie), it suffered massive inflation: they debased the Yen to garbage levels, drastically chopping down the standard of living of the typical Japanese person, wiping out their wealth, eroding the value of their output per capita. Only in a twisted, failed Keynesian experiment could one confuse such epic scale inflation with deflation. What they thought was deflation was an economic heat death due to their productive capital being tied up in low yield debt.

mitthrowaway22mo ago

Have you been to Japan? Salaries are low, but stuff is crazy cheap (even after the past year of inflation). People are still feeling whiplash from the fact that prices can change at all. Many menus and items have prices that have barely changed since the early 1990s, and most of those changes were to add sales taxes to the menu.

The exchange rate of the yen has dropped recently by a lot, but the inflation experience there has been the exact opposite of America's.

_DeadFred_2mo ago

Good thing our productive capital is safely all tied up into quickly depreciated AI infra then.

RetricOP2mo ago

“There's no chance US will default on its debts, all it has to do is to print more money.”

Trying to inflate away 40+ Trillion in debt would directly result in hyperinflation.

> they debased the Yen to garbage levels

Look at Yen to USD exchange rates and it’s clear they didn’t. “From 1991 to 2003, the Japanese economy, as measured by GDP, grew only 1.14% annually, while the average real growth rate between 2000 and 2010 was about 1%,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades Meanwhile the USD exchange rate in Jan 1988 was 127 vs 140 in 1998 vs 107 in 2008. It went up and down all through the 20 years of poor economic growth, but something else was clearly the issue.

ptero2mo ago

It did not go into a hyperinflation after the WW2, when the US debt load as a share of GDP was even higher than today; and deflated in the same way US is likely to do it now (bond rates forced way below inflation with yield control).

I am not saying that the process will be pleasant for the US or its citizens. But it is not without precedent and is extremely unlikely to cause hyperinflation. My 2c.

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