Do Not Pass Go

In high-velocity trash economy, there is no time to think or plan. Features are added on a whim with no consideration for long term planning. Work has become a mirror of the economy - fiat, valueless projects with runaway task inflation.

In today's FOMC Jerome Powell essentially stated (as an answer to a question) that savers will be punished because stimulating investment by maintaining rates at effective near zero bounds is "good for the economy" regardless how it affects the individual saver. His choice words included that their actions are for the collective economy and not the individual savers (as if they don't have a valuable role in our economy). It's an economy of consumption with no other end than to consume further.

Whether that is true can be debated but what can also be debated is whether a decade of low rates has contributed to stagnation. How many carbon copy startups do we need? How many different delivery services or car services do you need to use? All of which offer the same set of race to the bottom "features" at the expense of something or someone else (see: externalities). How many seed funds or series a b or c were spent to copy and rebuild the wheel aka the entire technology stack for company A to do what company B does? Is this good for the economy? Who truly believes that this is pushing us "forward" and isn't another form of broken windows policy(spare me pedants reading this who don't understand nuance)

One can argue that competition drives prices down, sure. Pareto principle /power laws whatever you want to call it begins to kick in here and there are diminishing returns for the amount of effort or cost put in. Eventually the only way to beat your competitor is to lose more money than they can, in a war of economic attrition. Is this really rewarding winners? Unlike what investors, founder/evangelists/new age Yogis want you to believe no they aren't doing anything paradigm shifting. Their vision may be to change the world but schizophrenics have visions too.

It's naive to think one should always be investing as there will always be a glut of ideas. As is often mentioned sitting on your cash is also a position. Not all ideas (more importantly teams) are deserving of being invested in, by forcing this (~0% rates) you are forcing investors to misallocate money in an economy to the detriment of the collective long term. Sometimes it's simply better to save until something better comes along.

These stresses are needed and required in any system for creating resiliency (antifragility, no I haven't read it yes I want to when I eventually find time). It's naive and even dangerous to think /shortsighted that we must invest at all costs in all enterprises even those which are inefficient or being founded by empty headed founders with the promise of future returns. As we have seen, this has proved ruinous not only for some of these founders but also unfortunately for the livelihoods of many who depended on these false hopes/dreams.

It's a given that capital will funnel not to those who will benefit society the most in the long term but to those who will benefit the capital distributors themselves the most in the short-term. (I leave it up to the reader to determine if these two align) The reasoning for this is that time horizons for many real paradigm changing projects are on the span of decades (though not all). The problem here is that the only organization which has this long of a time horizon to deploy sufficient capital (governments) has no real desire or expertise for this. We are at a crossroads. Capital incentives therefore must be shifted to self sustaining models for low time preference initiatives which are baked into the technologies/initiatives themselves. I know this sounds abstract so bear with me.