Asklemmy

43940 readers

977 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

400

Why is everything going to shit? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by Knusper@feddit.de to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

132 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Was just trying to explain to someone why everything is going to shit, specifically companies, and realized, I don't fully get it either.

I've got the following explanation. The sentences marked with "???" are were I'm lost. Anyone mind telling me, if they're correct and if so, why?

The past few years, central banks were giving out interest rates of 0% or even negative percentages. Regular banks would not quite pass this on, but you could still loan money and give it back later with no real interest payments.

This lead to lots of people investing in companies. As long as those companies paid out more money than those low interest rates, it was worthwhile. But at the same time, this meant companies didn't have to be profitable, because they could pay out investors from money that other investors gave them???

This has stopped being the case, as central banks are hiking interest rates again, to combat inflation???

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Saigonauticon@voltage.vn 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Very generally, you use the central bank rate to control the money supply. You increase it to remove money from the economy.

Even money is affected by supply and demand. Too much money in the economy is one of several things that can cause inflation -- for example because a surplus of money means people value money less and goods/services more. As a result, the value of goods/services as measured in money goes up.

Sadly, these are macro-level problems. Personally having a surplus of money sounds great, but the actual amount of extra money I made during Covid was not that much -- but give that much money to 100 million people and you're going to have inflation (I live in Vietnam where the economy was not seriously impacted).