Just as with the people who wake up every morning expecting the Second Coming, or indeed a Nuclear War, these folks fixate on a hyperinflationary US economy so much they begin to hallucinate.
Everything must be a sign. Strong job figures? Those are a precursor to hyperinflation. More mortgages fail than average? Hyperinflation on the horizon. Trump gets elected? He'll certainly cause hyperinflation. Trump loses? Democrat policies lead to hyperinflation.
They're not capable of understanding that they're wrong. JWs for example believe that the end of the world is extremely imminent... and it has been for over a hundred years. I know JWs who were taught as kids that their grandparents would live to see "God's Kingdom" and now, having lost those grandparents, they're still preaching the same nonsense and their own grandkids will be brought up to do the same.
Poster you're responding to, here. I completely agree that the US is not in imminent danger of hyperinflation, so long as it continues to assert itself through foreign policy and maintains the bully pulpit of democracy and the inertia of empire it's developed by putting boots on the ground anywhere its material interests are seriously threatened. Do you see me buying Argentine bonds? No, I have a Roth and a 401k.
Does that mean that I don't believe this country is trending - psychologically in terms of its money supply - toward an Argentine way of thinking and battling?
To become Argentine isn't a total collapse in any sense. It's the disappearance of trust in the currency - on and off, slowly, over years - without actually ceasing to use the currency for day to day transactions. That is what I'm referring to, and that is what is indicated by people buying gold bars at Costco. So yes, I agree that there isn't a better economy or market to put my money in. But that's not a ringing endorsement, either.
[edit] Also, to portray what I made as a fairly nuanced argument about Americans losing faith in the dollar, as if I were a Watchtower devotee or a maniacal doomsday conspiracy theorist, is disingenuous, and a poor-faith argument.
Truly, you don't really get how it works in Argentina or how similar it is to 10% inflation here, unless / until it were to hit 20% inflation here, and smart people would begin to look at what the dynamics were in a similar scenario, in another western country, and how they played out economically and politically. It's something you should look at whether you believe it's possible here or not. There's a vast degree of hubris associated with your declaration that it can't happen in America.
Lots of things could happen. Gamma Ray bombardment sterilisation of the solar system for example. That's the set up for the main plot of Greg Egan's "Diaspora".
But since neither becoming a Gleisner Robot nor Polis Citizenship are possible for me it's futile to spend time worrying about a nearby Gamma Ray burst. If it happens I would likely die instantly, but even if not there's no reason to plan for that.
I care about contingency planning a great deal but it makes no sense to plan for events which are both extremely unlikely and very difficult to successfully ameliorate.
JWs are still on about all that? Figured they would have switched that up over the years. Their "flock" is still vulnerable to various roving con-men then as long as they promote that crap. Anyone could swoop in there, slowly fleece a congregation, and move on to the next. Sad.
Segments of HN have been predicting the imminent collapse of the US dollar for at least the last decade. One thing 10-years-ago HN had but today doesn’t is the constant predictions of the imminent collapse of the VC startup model in general, or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong threads these days.
That said, you may be correct in that the voices have gotten louder. Also, the Covid conspiracy stuff drives me up the wall, and I didn’t remember older HN being like that.
Many of the threads I see recently (like 6-8 months) no longer predict the collapse of the VC startup model. They claim that it's already here. The free money days are over, that sort of thing.
I think you're talking about me, for saying America is starting to remind me of Argentina in certain ways? I assure you I'm not a kook, or a doomsayer. I'm just someone who's lived in both countries through several economic crises, each of which had very different characteristics. Maybe I didn't express myself eloquently enough. You're free to rebut anything I said or to contact me personally. I don't think slandering me by way of slandering the entirety of HN is the exact right way to show you know what you're talking about.
It was PG's pet project. Plenty of YC startups don't use HN anymore aside from their 1 Demo post and on the outside it looks like Bookface and other initiatives are given more headcount than HN within the entire YC organization.
Kooks? The flip side of that coin is the NPC (Non playing characters) that have trouble dealing with any information that could harm their little "comfort cocoon". Nobody has your best interest in mind, not even yourself if you step back far enough.
Everything must be a sign. Strong job figures? Those are a precursor to hyperinflation. More mortgages fail than average? Hyperinflation on the horizon. Trump gets elected? He'll certainly cause hyperinflation. Trump loses? Democrat policies lead to hyperinflation.
They're not capable of understanding that they're wrong. JWs for example believe that the end of the world is extremely imminent... and it has been for over a hundred years. I know JWs who were taught as kids that their grandparents would live to see "God's Kingdom" and now, having lost those grandparents, they're still preaching the same nonsense and their own grandkids will be brought up to do the same.