Destroying agencies that collect statistics is a "feature", not a bug.
Why deal with unemployment, declining GDP, etc when you can just shut down the agency figuring out how many people are unemployed and where the GDP is going?
Better yet, outsource it to the guy who gave you $10M in campaign donations or bought your crypto coins and then wink-nodded at you, and give him a $50M contract to do something the feds were doing for $20M - and he lies to make you look better. Win-win-win...
In the middle of Covid, the Federal Reserve changed the definition of M2 money supply at the exact moment of the largest increase in the money supply to date for unknown reasons. It made all comparisons between pre- and post-change numbers difficult, probably a coincidence.
USG is an independent organism that is under attack and it is fighting back however it can. Remember, it's always looking out for itself, not for you.
I’ve found the following 2020 note about a change to M1 definition (not M2) and which didn’t make M1 supply look smaller but larger.
I think you should back up your claim with a reliable source.
> First Monthly H.6 Statistical Release
As announced on December 17, 2020, the Board's Statistical Release H.6, "Money Stock Measures," will recognize savings deposits as a type of transaction account, starting with the publication today. This recognition reflects the Board's action on April 24, 2020, to remove the regulatory distinction between transaction accounts and savings deposits by deleting the six-per-month transfer limit on savings deposits in Regulation D. This change means that savings deposits have had a similar regulatory definition and the same liquidity characteristics as the transaction accounts reported as "Other checkable deposits" on the H.6 statistical release since the change to Regulation D. Consequently, today's H.6 statistical release combines release items "Savings deposits" and "Other checkable deposits" retroactively back to May 2020 and includes the resulting sum, reported as "Other liquid deposits," in the M1 monetary aggregate. This action increases the M1 monetary aggregate significantly while leaving the M2 monetary aggregate unchanged
That exactly supports what I was saying. The definition change was a bureaucratic immune response, allowing plausible deniability around unfavorable comparisons.
If an everyman were to look at FRED and see an M1 hockey stick, he may reasonably think “look at all this money they’re printing!”
A fact checker would point out the everyman’s graph is misleading: it includes a definition change which inflates recent values.
But the money printing was actually unprecedented, and the fake graph told you more of the truth than the factcheck.
FUD / Citation required. Quick google search reveals you are incorrect (components of M2 shifted, and portions moved between M1 and M2, but M1 is a subset of M2, so there is no significant change to total M2 supply before and after).
Also Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government.
> Before May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus (1) savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts); (2) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less individual retirement account (IRA) and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and (3) balances in retail money market funds (MMFs) less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs.
> Beginning May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus (1) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less IRA and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and (2) balances in retail MMFs less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs. Seasonally adjusted M2 is constructed by summing savings deposits (before May 2020), small-denomination time deposits, and retail MMFs, each seasonally adjusted separately, and adding this result to seasonally adjusted M1.
EDIT: Of course since M1 is what really changed, M2 is effectively the same.
The comment you replied to was correct, as M1 was expanded to include savings deposits.
Here's a link to a Q&A about the change, and the relevant explanation.
"3. Why are savings deposits being recognized on the H.6 statistical release as a transaction account?
Posted: 12/17/2020
A. As announced on March 15, 2020, the Board of Governors reduced reserve requirement ratios on net transaction accounts to 0 percent, effective March 26, 2020. This action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions and rendered the regulatory distinction between reservable “transaction accounts” and nonreservable “savings deposits” unnecessary. On April 24, 2020, the Board removed this regulatory distinction by deleting the six-per-month transfer limit on savings deposits in Regulation D. This action resulted in savings deposits having the same liquidity characteristics as the transaction accounts currently reported as “Other checkable deposits” on the H.6 statistical release.
To account for the change in their liquidity characteristics, savings deposits will be recognized as a type of transaction account on the H.6 statistical release"
So explaining M2 in terms of M1 only works if you include those definition in the equation. Otherwise it will falsely look like M2 fell by the amount that M1 rose.
Letting the LLM explain it more clearly than I can:
What exactly changed according to the FRED definition?
Before May 2020:
M2 included:
M1 (currency in circulation + checking accounts + other transaction accounts)
Savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts, MMDAs)
Small-denomination time deposits (under $100,000, excluding IRA and Keogh balances)
Retail money market mutual fund balances (excluding IRA and Keogh balances)
Thus, M2 = M1 + Savings deposits (including MMDAs) + Small time deposits + Retail MMFs.
After May 2020:
M1 was expanded to include savings deposits and money market deposit accounts (previously, savings and MMDAs were NOT part of M1; they were only part of M2).
Since savings and MMDAs moved into M1, the definition of M2 no longer needs to separately add these categories—they are already captured within M1.
Thus, after May 2020, the Fed simplified the definition to:
M1 itself was significantly expanded (now including savings and money market deposits), causing M1 to spike substantially overnight.
M2 overall did NOT lose or gain any category. It still includes all the exact same accounts and balances. It simply shifted the categorization of savings deposits and MMDAs into M1, so these no longer need separate listing when describing M2.
Fair enough. I'm pretty sure OP meant M1. My comment reads more like a "well akshually" than a useful point (since technically M2 changed, but not in a meaningful way).
> Also Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government.
Well, they seem to get along pretty well in any case :).
They changed the m1 definition in the middle of the largest m1 increase in history. It messed up all the graphs and you couldn’t get a sense of the scale of the printing.
the re-definition seems fairly early in COVID (May 2020) rather than "In the middle of Covid" and appears to only drop savings deposits. [1]
> Before May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus
(1) savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts);
(2) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less individual retirement account (IRA) and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and
(3) balances in retail money market funds (MMFs) less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs.
> Beginning May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus
(1) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less IRA and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and
(2) balances in retail MMFs less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs. Seasonally adjusted M2 is constructed by summing savings deposits (before May 2020), small-denomination time deposits, and retail MMFs, each seasonally adjusted separately, and adding this result to seasonally adjusted M1.
isn't it more accurate to point to M1 which increased substantially?
Name Jan 2021 Dec 2020 Jan 2020 Units
M1 18,063.1 17,803.0 3,977.6 Billions of Dollars
M2 19,335.0 19,110.3 15,401.3 Billions of Dollars
M1 was also re-defined to move savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts) from M2 to M1.
> Before May 2020, M1 consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3) other checkable deposits (OCDs), consisting of negotiable order of withdrawal, or NOW, and automatic transfer service, or ATS, accounts at depository institutions, share draft accounts at credit unions, and demand deposits at thrift institutions.
> Beginning May 2020, M1 consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3) other liquid deposits, consisting of OCDs and savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts). Seasonally adjusted M1 is constructed by summing currency, demand deposits, and OCDs (before May 2020) or other liquid deposits (beginning May 2020), each seasonally adjusted separately.
"He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.""
Given how woefully behind American healthcare and education and retirement is, it's quite remarkable Americans don't understand how poor they are.
This definitely won’t be representative of the full spectrum of health care, but it’s what I found after a quick search. I wouldn’t call it woefully behind, but definitely not winning any medals anytime soon.
It's one thing to say that someone who lives far away isn't as well off as they claim to be and another to say that someone's retirement account hasn't gone down.
The article covers many cases that predate the current administration. I'm not contesting your point, but I think TFA is about a bipartisan failure to keep federal data collection infrastructure up to date.
It's not a very good article, but it hints at another angle, the problem is not only lack of funding growth, it is that modernizing and keeping up with the ever expanding mandates is not possible without major reinvestment. If they want great precision about Guatemalen migrant single mothers in the CPS because that is now a important group to gather data on, it costs a lot. (Worth noting too that these expanding mandates are often very political in nature and actually undermine the enterprise as adding too many features to software without regard to tech debt will often tend to do.)
What should strike many readers: zero mention of efficiency gains or emerging methods made possible by LLM, uav, and other modern tech. A tech savvy reader should wonder about that stuff.
One of the best sales pitches for increasing funding is specifically this, modernizing costs money in the next 5 years but saves much, much more money longer term. Is it not the right time for robot census workers?
While all administrations hide evidence, conservative/republican presidents do it pretty openly. Bush and 9/11 was a great example. I dont know of too many bigger lies/coverups than the information surrounding 9/11 and the "war on terror".
The issue is that something like 1/3rd of americans will eagerly believe anything if it's directed towards the right victims or their party says it.
> "If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any," Trump asserted.
>
> Earlier in the day, the president, on social media, called “testing a double-edged sword” that makes the country “look bad” but is “good to have.”
It's hard to get what he really want from that snippet .
Would it be 'surprise surprise' when then same oligarchs start companies that provide "essential" services again (with AI trained on publicly owned IP)? And guess what, they also have the rolodex of domain experts that they threw to the unemployment market and who can blame n% of them holding their nose and then going to work for the same (cause you know, gotta feed the family and pay the mortgage).
Pretty much all his takes are wrong. What I find most absurd is how he managed to convince everyone that he is a genius. Ashley Vance extolled his wisdom, and so did Tim Urban.
Destroying agencies that collect statistics is a "feature", not a bug.
Why deal with unemployment, declining GDP, etc when you can just shut down the agency figuring out how many people are unemployed and where the GDP is going?
Better yet, outsource it to the guy who gave you $10M in campaign donations or bought your crypto coins and then wink-nodded at you, and give him a $50M contract to do something the feds were doing for $20M - and he lies to make you look better. Win-win-win...
In the middle of Covid, the Federal Reserve changed the definition of M2 money supply at the exact moment of the largest increase in the money supply to date for unknown reasons. It made all comparisons between pre- and post-change numbers difficult, probably a coincidence.
USG is an independent organism that is under attack and it is fighting back however it can. Remember, it's always looking out for itself, not for you.
I’ve found the following 2020 note about a change to M1 definition (not M2) and which didn’t make M1 supply look smaller but larger.
I think you should back up your claim with a reliable source.
> First Monthly H.6 Statistical Release As announced on December 17, 2020, the Board's Statistical Release H.6, "Money Stock Measures," will recognize savings deposits as a type of transaction account, starting with the publication today. This recognition reflects the Board's action on April 24, 2020, to remove the regulatory distinction between transaction accounts and savings deposits by deleting the six-per-month transfer limit on savings deposits in Regulation D. This change means that savings deposits have had a similar regulatory definition and the same liquidity characteristics as the transaction accounts reported as "Other checkable deposits" on the H.6 statistical release since the change to Regulation D. Consequently, today's H.6 statistical release combines release items "Savings deposits" and "Other checkable deposits" retroactively back to May 2020 and includes the resulting sum, reported as "Other liquid deposits," in the M1 monetary aggregate. This action increases the M1 monetary aggregate significantly while leaving the M2 monetary aggregate unchanged
Source — https://www.federalreserve.gov/feeds/h6.html
That exactly supports what I was saying. The definition change was a bureaucratic immune response, allowing plausible deniability around unfavorable comparisons.
If an everyman were to look at FRED and see an M1 hockey stick, he may reasonably think “look at all this money they’re printing!”
A fact checker would point out the everyman’s graph is misleading: it includes a definition change which inflates recent values.
But the money printing was actually unprecedented, and the fake graph told you more of the truth than the factcheck.
FUD / Citation required. Quick google search reveals you are incorrect (components of M2 shifted, and portions moved between M1 and M2, but M1 is a subset of M2, so there is no significant change to total M2 supply before and after).
Also Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
> Before May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus (1) savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts); (2) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less individual retirement account (IRA) and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and (3) balances in retail money market funds (MMFs) less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs.
> Beginning May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus (1) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less IRA and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and (2) balances in retail MMFs less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs. Seasonally adjusted M2 is constructed by summing savings deposits (before May 2020), small-denomination time deposits, and retail MMFs, each seasonally adjusted separately, and adding this result to seasonally adjusted M1.
EDIT: Of course since M1 is what really changed, M2 is effectively the same.
The comment you replied to was correct, as M1 was expanded to include savings deposits.
Here's a link to a Q&A about the change, and the relevant explanation.
"3. Why are savings deposits being recognized on the H.6 statistical release as a transaction account? Posted: 12/17/2020
A. As announced on March 15, 2020, the Board of Governors reduced reserve requirement ratios on net transaction accounts to 0 percent, effective March 26, 2020. This action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions and rendered the regulatory distinction between reservable “transaction accounts” and nonreservable “savings deposits” unnecessary. On April 24, 2020, the Board removed this regulatory distinction by deleting the six-per-month transfer limit on savings deposits in Regulation D. This action resulted in savings deposits having the same liquidity characteristics as the transaction accounts currently reported as “Other checkable deposits” on the H.6 statistical release.
To account for the change in their liquidity characteristics, savings deposits will be recognized as a type of transaction account on the H.6 statistical release"
M1 changed in a way that made M1 larger.
So explaining M2 in terms of M1 only works if you include those definition in the equation. Otherwise it will falsely look like M2 fell by the amount that M1 rose.
Letting the LLM explain it more clearly than I can:
What exactly changed according to the FRED definition? Before May 2020: M2 included: M1 (currency in circulation + checking accounts + other transaction accounts) Savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts, MMDAs) Small-denomination time deposits (under $100,000, excluding IRA and Keogh balances) Retail money market mutual fund balances (excluding IRA and Keogh balances) Thus, M2 = M1 + Savings deposits (including MMDAs) + Small time deposits + Retail MMFs.
After May 2020: M1 was expanded to include savings deposits and money market deposit accounts (previously, savings and MMDAs were NOT part of M1; they were only part of M2). Since savings and MMDAs moved into M1, the definition of M2 no longer needs to separately add these categories—they are already captured within M1. Thus, after May 2020, the Fed simplified the definition to:
M2 = (New) M1 + Small-denomination time deposits + Retail MMFs
But importantly, note the following:
M1 itself was significantly expanded (now including savings and money market deposits), causing M1 to spike substantially overnight.
M2 overall did NOT lose or gain any category. It still includes all the exact same accounts and balances. It simply shifted the categorization of savings deposits and MMDAs into M1, so these no longer need separate listing when describing M2.
Fair enough. I'm pretty sure OP meant M1. My comment reads more like a "well akshually" than a useful point (since technically M2 changed, but not in a meaningful way).
Anyway, I think we understand each other.
> Also Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government.
Well, they seem to get along pretty well in any case :).
They changed the m1 definition in the middle of the largest m1 increase in history. It messed up all the graphs and you couldn’t get a sense of the scale of the printing.
the re-definition seems fairly early in COVID (May 2020) rather than "In the middle of Covid" and appears to only drop savings deposits. [1]
> Before May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus (1) savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts); (2) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less individual retirement account (IRA) and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and (3) balances in retail money market funds (MMFs) less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs.
> Beginning May 2020, M2 consists of M1 plus (1) small-denomination time deposits (time deposits in amounts of less than $100,000) less IRA and Keogh balances at depository institutions; and (2) balances in retail MMFs less IRA and Keogh balances at MMFs. Seasonally adjusted M2 is constructed by summing savings deposits (before May 2020), small-denomination time deposits, and retail MMFs, each seasonally adjusted separately, and adding this result to seasonally adjusted M1.
isn't it more accurate to point to M1 which increased substantially?
Name Jan 2021 Dec 2020 Jan 2020 Units
M1 18,063.1 17,803.0 3,977.6 Billions of Dollars
M2 19,335.0 19,110.3 15,401.3 Billions of Dollars
M1 was also re-defined to move savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts) from M2 to M1.
> Before May 2020, M1 consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3) other checkable deposits (OCDs), consisting of negotiable order of withdrawal, or NOW, and automatic transfer service, or ATS, accounts at depository institutions, share draft accounts at credit unions, and demand deposits at thrift institutions.
> Beginning May 2020, M1 consists of (1) currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions; (2) demand deposits at commercial banks (excluding those amounts held by depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign banks and official institutions) less cash items in the process of collection and Federal Reserve float; and (3) other liquid deposits, consisting of OCDs and savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts). Seasonally adjusted M1 is constructed by summing currency, demand deposits, and OCDs (before May 2020) or other liquid deposits (beginning May 2020), each seasonally adjusted separately.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
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im a young middle class programmer. I own a tesla and like Elon. I don’t own the stock. I have $8k in a 401k.
(rm reddit content)
Might be worth checking if your employer has 401k matching :)
Why do you like Elon?
This might be true for air pollution and preventable diseases, but these quick losses in real wealth are immediately apparent.
Plenty of authoritarian countries cook the books successfully.
The story of Yeltsin visiting an American grocery store comes to mind:
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
"He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.""
Given how woefully behind American healthcare and education and retirement is, it's quite remarkable Americans don't understand how poor they are.
How woefully behind is American Healthcare, Education and retirement exactly though?
34th on life expectancy:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK571929/
Spending per capita is a disaster:
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
Retirement ranking 29 of 48 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/10/16/her...
You're welcome to participate in the conversation beyond just sea lion king.
Life expectancy in the US is behind 47 countries according to https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
Infant mortality rate is behind 53 countries: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...
This definitely won’t be representative of the full spectrum of health care, but it’s what I found after a quick search. I wouldn’t call it woefully behind, but definitely not winning any medals anytime soon.
They’re ranked 32nd in fiscal sustainability in relation to healthcare and 10th overall.
48th in life expectancy.
29th in retirement security.
24th in science education.
38th in math.
36th in the Gini index.
27th in social mobility.
This is why U S A chants are always so cringe.
It's one thing to say that someone who lives far away isn't as well off as they claim to be and another to say that someone's retirement account hasn't gone down.
See here's the thing. It's easy to prevent it from going down. You just print money. The number goes up but the purchasing power goes down.
The article covers many cases that predate the current administration. I'm not contesting your point, but I think TFA is about a bipartisan failure to keep federal data collection infrastructure up to date.
It's not a very good article, but it hints at another angle, the problem is not only lack of funding growth, it is that modernizing and keeping up with the ever expanding mandates is not possible without major reinvestment. If they want great precision about Guatemalen migrant single mothers in the CPS because that is now a important group to gather data on, it costs a lot. (Worth noting too that these expanding mandates are often very political in nature and actually undermine the enterprise as adding too many features to software without regard to tech debt will often tend to do.)
What should strike many readers: zero mention of efficiency gains or emerging methods made possible by LLM, uav, and other modern tech. A tech savvy reader should wonder about that stuff.
One of the best sales pitches for increasing funding is specifically this, modernizing costs money in the next 5 years but saves much, much more money longer term. Is it not the right time for robot census workers?
Reminds me of Trump’s view on Covid testing, “If We Stop Testing, We’d Have Fewer Cases”.
https://www.voanews.com/amp/covid-19-pandemic_trump-if-we-st...
While all administrations hide evidence, conservative/republican presidents do it pretty openly. Bush and 9/11 was a great example. I dont know of too many bigger lies/coverups than the information surrounding 9/11 and the "war on terror".
The issue is that something like 1/3rd of americans will eagerly believe anything if it's directed towards the right victims or their party says it.
From the page you linked:
It's hard to get what he really want from that snippet .Indeed, how do we know they are "destroyed"?
Would it be 'surprise surprise' when then same oligarchs start companies that provide "essential" services again (with AI trained on publicly owned IP)? And guess what, they also have the rolodex of domain experts that they threw to the unemployment market and who can blame n% of them holding their nose and then going to work for the same (cause you know, gotta feed the family and pay the mortgage).
It’s all infrastructure, physical and non physical.
There was an investment gap of 2.6 trillion dollars under Biden. Expect that gap to increase and see way more stuff collapse in the coming decades.
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We should crowdfund someone to follow him around with a giant posterboard of all his various hot takes that ended up being wrong
Pretty much all his takes are wrong. What I find most absurd is how he managed to convince everyone that he is a genius. Ashley Vance extolled his wisdom, and so did Tim Urban.
No way that's going to fit onto one poster.
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