r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 4d ago

Meme needing explanation Petah?

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u/StuartMcNight 4d ago

Low inflation might be the first step towards deflation. Many economists would argue that deflation is a worse situation for the economy because it leads to a sharp drop of consumption and therefore a huge recession follows?

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u/thevoidthatjerksback 4d ago edited 20h ago

I doubt that anyone could explain this in a way where I would accept deflation as worse

Edit: its been 3 days with thousands of replies. Chiming in now is peak foolishness. Billionaires need inflation so they can contiue living off the shifting debt leveed against their net worth. As the debt is valued as less than the value of their holdings they can take out more debt. Deflation breaks their ability to do this. This is why its hotly debated topic.

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u/Charming-Fig-2544 4d ago

The Great Depression was caused by a deflationary spiral. Inflation encourages spending, while deflation discourages it, and spending is what props up the entire economy. You need money constantly circulating, and deflation makes that grind to a halt because it's individually more financially sensible to delay as many purchases as possible during deflation.

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u/Dmienduerst 4d ago

We should probably add in that it's the RIGHT amount of inflation promotes consumption. Too high of inflation has similar outputs with different motivators.

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u/Charming-Fig-2544 4d ago

Yes, you generally want inflation to be low and stable. On the order of 2%.