Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.

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inopinatus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From the other side of the Atlantic this sounds like straight Thatcherism, in which Chicago-school monetarism was an ideological anti-union weapon, and the Thatcher cabinet was not coy about it. However I think the US went that way first even if Reaganomics came later.

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scrps 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.

	▲	johnebgd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unions are the best of all the bad solutions we’ve come up with so far for labor to compete with capital. The worst of course is collectivism through government, though that’s being tried again…

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seg_lol 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sociopaths. It breaks me to see the Fed use interest rates to cause unemployment as the lever against inflation. It all seems so cruel.

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zahlman 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They use interest rates to protect against inflationary (and deflationary) spirals, which are known to be devastating. The effect on the unemployment rate is a known, and predictable, side effect. But formal unemployment is small compared to labour force dropout anyway, and the latter is not necessarily so sensitive to economic conditions anyway. Besides which, the unemployment rate can't really keep going down forever.

Zoom out; recent levels are actually quite impressive in the USA. Yes, they've climbed since 2023, but they're only just reaching the pre-GFC minimum (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...).

Zoom out further: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/

Had it not been for COVID you'd be at more than 16 years without a(n NBER-determined) recession, long enough to suggest a fundamental shift vs. how things worked in the several decades before that.

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ericd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you ever read about people burning piles of German currency because it was better than using it to buy firewood with? Not to say we would get there, but allowing inflation to run is not kinder.

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wqaatwt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Inflation like that doesn’t just happen. It can only be the outcome of explicit government policy. Like in post WW1 Germany they wanted to wipe the value of all domestic government debt they accumulated during the war.

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badc0ffee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you ever tried to start a fire with a bunch of paper? It doesn't work great, and what a mess.

	▲	phil21 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Done it plenty of times. Works great until you run out of paper.

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inferiorhuman 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think these days folks typically use Zimbabwe or Argentina as examples.