Reply To: Boron availability

[Brian H]

Aeronaut wrote: kieran, I don’t get the part about the rich getting that way by hoarding. My understanding is that they get that way by reinvesting otherwise idle capital to (hopefully) make more to invest. A lack of leadership could make it look like hoarding, which would also be dumb because it makes the hoarded money even more taxable.

The scenario you described above sure looks like it’s straight out of Obama’s playbook,imo, designed to socialize America.

You got that right. Unless the rich manage to hoard without using banks or investing, then their money is in effect loaned to someone(s) who believe they can do something productive and profitable with it, more than enough to pay the interest costs.

The chaos in government financial policies currently, plus the haphazard loading of ancillary costs (mandatory HC, huge new reporting requirements reaching down into very small firms, etc.) has made corporations gun-shy about using their on-hand capital. There’s enough of that sitting side-lined to get a lot of balls rolling, but fear of getting hung out to dry is preventing its use.

At least the timeline for FF to affect the economy is not decades or worse. It would be nice if it were immediate, but I have hopes that news of viable unity-plus generation will start to kick some of the stops loose within a year or two. I’m not so concerned about the Wall Street factor as you seem to be; consider that every dollar not spent on “old” plant and processes is freed up for the new. The physical implementation of FF will be an immense “stimulus” with wide knock-on effects all on its own; the acceleration of general economic and productive activity freed up by its knock-down of energy costs will be the second, larger, wave.

kieren, calling that “deflationary” is like calling all productivity increases deflationary. What really happens is that the quality and value and sophistication of products and services increases faster than the input costs go down, which maintains demand and general price levels.