Comment by lifeisstillgood

Comment by lifeisstillgood 7 hours ago

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It’s not realpage causing inflation. Come on

Look, the first most important totally big thing is that at the beginning of covid governments around the world printed a boatload of cash and gave it out as furlough for waiters and nurses and construction workers. And that was a Good Thing. People could eat and pay rent. But that took a boatload of cash - US printed 10 trillion dollars - the UK a trillion. 27 European nations all did something similar - the Middle East. Noone knows how much but it’s tens of trillions - perhaps let’s say 50 trillion. With a T.

Then that money went to the landlords and the supermarkets and the. Went up to the supermarket shareholders and the owners of the office buildings and eventually the wealthy - those who can live without salary - they got almost all of it. And they have to spend that money on something - property, stocks, gold, land

It’s inflation because there is an extra fifty trillion floating around.

Real page is doing nothing amazing - collating price information and telling landlords “hey a flat like this is renting for 20% on the next street”. Well that’s because some part of that fifty trillion just got invested in a company that hired a guy who moved into the neighbourhood- it’s going to chnage the character of the neighbourhood and those who are unlucky get squeezed out the bottom and sleep in a park looking over the Golden Gate.

Look at any article in MMT. This is something we solve with 1. Taxation (equal tax treatments for capital gains etc) and 2. Sane social policies (education, health etc)

The DOJ is looking for a culprit who is breaking a system that otherwise would work - that’s the point of anti-cartel laws. Ut the system is broken - and it has a simple fix. Tax the rich - we did it for Russian Olivarchs, now spread the love

ethbr1 7 hours ago

> Real page is doing nothing amazing - collating price information and telling landlords “hey a flat like this is renting for 20% on the next street”.

Not true and not what RealPage is being charged with.

What RealPage actually did was:

   - Provide a suggested rent
   - Set their default at "use suggested rent"
   - Promise landlords that suggested rent would always increase
   - Pressure landorders who rented under the suggested price
   - Connect landlords, so they could talk about pricing
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  • a_wild_dandan 7 hours ago

    > - Pressure landorders who rented under the suggested price

    How did RealPage do this? I'm OOTL.

    Reply View 4 replies
    • ethbr1 6 hours ago

      >> The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations.

      https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-the-r...

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    • bagels 7 hours ago

      My understanding of what's alleged: Landlords have incentive to join because they can collude with other landlords to get higher prices. If they don't participate in the price fixing, they lose access to the platform.

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      • Aunche 7 hours ago

        I have a really hard time believing these allegations because that would mean that they're actively trying to push away paying customers, which neither helps Realpage nor the alledged cartel. Everything I've read about this has been suspiciously vague. What it sounds like they're doing is punishing property managers from deviating from the pricing algorithm rather than the property companies themselves.

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        • GauntletWizard 5 hours ago

          > actively trying to push away paying customers

          This is making the assumption that there's pushback against their "advice". People are stupid, greedy, and corrupt. Realpage only needed to make promises, promises that it could only keep if most of their customers followed suit, to get most (the vast, vast majority) of their customers to follow suit.

          Their customers aren't mom and pop landlords with a second property; THey're not even full-time landlords with a dozen units that pay the bills. They're giant property investment companies, They "only" own a quarter of the units between them, but that's enough to shift the needle. They're very heirarchical, and if the upper management says "Use this pricing model", they'll just fire you if you don't. There are no exceptions, there's no leeway; They have internal apps for building the contracts and their "property managers" literally can't go outside of them.

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  • lifeisstillgood 7 hours ago

    Yes, but so what. Modern city property rental Markets are open transparent competitive markets.

    The idea that NYC was full of landlords who never looked at a listings page, had no idea how much similar apartments were going for, and have suddenly been transformed into rapacious greed monsters by a few phone calls from RealPage sales team is ridiculous.

    Assets have gone up like SpaceX rockets since Covid - gold, stocks and of course property. And the top end of the market has the wealthy beneficiaries of that renting this nicest stuff, so the people who used to be there now move one rung down and price out that rung who move down and …

    This is just a facet of systemic inflation - it’s not the actions of evil RealPage causing it. Sure they aren’t helping and may have broken laws - but FFS if market price information provision is now collusion Reuters and Bloomberg have got some lawyering up to do

    Reply View 1 reply
    • ethbr1 6 hours ago

      There's a big difference between inefficient decentralized price fixing and efficient centralized price fixing, because once a centralized entity reaches critical penetration its pricing power increases drastically.

      When there aren't enough defectors to move the market, they can be ignored.

      Reply View 0 replies
pfannkuchen 7 hours ago

> printed a boatload of cash and gave it out as furlough for waiters and nurses and construction workers … US printed 10 trillion dollars

Well, I don’t think 10 trillion was paid to waiters and nurses and construction workers, etc. I’m curious what that actual number was. I’d be surprised if it touched 1 trillion. Something like 250 billion sounds more plausible to me, but if anyone has a source that would be interesting.

10 trillion was added to the money supply, but I believe the vast majority of it went somewhere else and never passed through the sort of people you mention.

The money supply expansion did juice the stock market and avoided a recession on paper, while shifting real value from savers and earners over to asset holders. Working as intended, I suppose.

I think the biggest BS aspect of inflation is that wages are set in USD basically universally and are therefore subject to inflation.

You can choose to move your savings out of USD and into something more stable, but if you are a worker you can’t move your comp into anything else.

The second most BS part is being taxed on inflation whenever you sell assets. Even if the asset doesn’t have any real appreciation, you get to pay tax on whatever the government decided to inflate the currency by. Absolute nonsense.

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  • lifeisstillgood 7 hours ago

    I think we are in basic agreement

    >>> while shifting real value from savers and earners over to asset holders. Working as intended, I suppose.

    No furlough directly did not receive all of that but the “cost of covid” (the amount spent by government without taxing it back) was on that order. I wish I had a better line accounting of it.

    But the basic effect is the same - the owners of assets - the wealthiest in society, get a greater proportion of the “tokens that allocate future resource allocation” (dollars) than previously - and this means they put that money somewhere - and we see that as inflation everywhere.

    The solution as I see it is taxing the assets (not a “wealth tax” but more same approaches).

    Reply View 1 reply
    • pfannkuchen 5 hours ago

      On taxing assets, I think money is used for too many different things.

      If we are talking about people owning yachts or airplanes or fifth houses or whatever, then yes, tax the heck out of those.

      However, assets with a dollar valuation are also how we assign control of economic functions, i.e. businesses. Control of an economic function is really, seriously qualitatively different than owning yachts or airplanes. Economic functions operating well or not so well has an enormous impact on the success or failure of a society.

      Changing how we assign economic function control is very risky, since there is no way to simulate the outcome.

      What do you think about that? Are you including share ownership in the asset tax? If so, do you think this will somehow not alter economic control?

      An alternative might be to have a split currency that is not freely exchangeable, where one is for business control and one is for stuff. You can sell your business, hold the business currency for however long and then buy another business or part of a business. But if you want to convert the business currency to stuff currency, at that point you are taxed heavily.

      I would be in favor of a separate currency class for land also, for the record.

      (Not sure if this has some obvious fatal flaw, I am but an armchair economist.)

      Reply View 0 replies
elashri 7 hours ago

According to the IMF [1]. The world GDP in 2020 was about 85T. I really would question such a high estimation for the printed money to be anything near 50T or even something high to these levels.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...

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  • lifeisstillgood 7 hours ago

    Good stats on this are hard to come by. I am happy to see better figures and happy to wind down from 50T. But the order of magnitude is on the money - if it’s 10T or 30 does it really matter? It’s an unprecedented increase in such a short time - inflation figures have barely caught up - we will be seeing inflation go through the roof for decades to come and central banks trying to use their only lever (interest rates) on something that is a fiscal problem.

    So follow my more restrained calculations: statia below gives us a 3TN increase for covid period, UK gov figures have 800BN Sterling which is 1T USD give or take. Then look at 27 European countries - at 500M people spending at the rate of USA gives us 5T, before we even look at Japan and Asia. We have got over 10TN. That’s a boatload in anyone’s momey

    US fed balance sheet increases by 3 TN 2020-24 https://www.statista.com/topics/6441/quantitative-easing-in-...

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Workaccount2 7 hours ago

Never mind it's taboo to talk about how the pandemic made you wealthy. The divide is real, and I feel for the people who thought a $2000 stimulus check was a win. If only they knew about assets and broker margin.

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lumost 7 hours ago

To my knowledge, this has only ever been done successfully during ww2. The mechanism used was semi-forced lending via war bonds. The war bonds were predominantly purchased by wealthy individuals and the rate of return was lower than all alternatives.

The spending of war debt on the other hand went out to common individuals. As the war debt was never repaid, encumbants would spend the next 2 decades with lower rates of return compared to new market participants.

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  • dragonwriter 7 hours ago

    > As the war debt was never repaid

    The war debt was, in fact, repaid.

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TacticalCoder 6 hours ago

> This is something we solve with 1. Taxation (equal tax treatments for capital gains etc) and 2. Sane social policies (education, health etc)

Ah yup. First we print tens of trillions and go to unsustainable debt levels and then we explain that, now, we need to tax people.

Another solution would have been to maybe not print tens of trillions out of their arse?

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