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The endless cynicism in this thread is so very draining. Can we not do this terrible circle of excessive criticism?

The productive comments here are so far and few between. I have no issue with people criticizing Anthropic or AI companies in general, but for the love of everything, at least make worthy criticisms. Not these incessant sophisms.


The cynicism will stop when the musical chairs of money fueling the bubble does.

The one I've gotten extremely tired of is every single AI thread now having dozens upon dozens of the exact same joke where people talk in Claudish.

It was funny the first time. But I genuinely don't understand people 6 levels deep or 30 comments down the thread thinking, "wow - this'll really knock their socks off".


It almost makes you understand how a well-coordinated artificial superintelligence could wipe us out, eh?

Yeah this website is almost unreadable

I for one welcome our AI overlords.

I am mostly excited about all this but also feel incredibly sad at times about many aspects of it. We need a new word for this feeling pronto.

Deep Blues.

blursed?

There are a few reasons, it seems. If you address the following things, you should be much better off to post in this forum.

- You posted the same thing more than once. This could be seen as spam. Try one really good, detailed post, instead of many okay ones.

- Your account is pretty new, and newer accounts have no reputation. Again, people could think you are a spam account. Try looking around this forum more, and making some good comments. This will help build your reputation here and give you a better understanding of how things work.

- Your project seems to have been developed with heavy help from AI. This is fine, but AI coded projects can sometimes be poor quality and low effort. People likely assumed your project was poor quality and low effort. When using AI, try to at least do the writing yourself. Use AI for the code, but write the project description and things like the `README.md` by yourself.

- Your descriptions of the project were somewhat unclear. You could gain from crafting a better, shorter, more direct [elevator pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch). This will help people understand what you've built better.

- A lot of your post and comments have poor grammar and spelling. Again, this a sign of low effort. You should try to make your writing more correct with grammar and spelling before posting. If you need help with this, a good idea is to ask AI to review your writing before posting, and then rewriting based on the grammar/spelling mistakes it brings up. (Please note though that you should still write everything in the final post yourself.)

People on this forum appreciate effort. That's probably why your posts were not received well. Some people on here saw a lot of signs in your posts that are common with low effort content. That's why you were flagged.

That all being said, personally, I wouldn't have flagged your post. It was a little rough around the edges, and I'd urge you to polish what you put out to the world more, but overall I think you did follow this site's rules.

Even if you didn't, that is no excuse for people on this site to insult you as they have. You are welcome here, and I wish you the best, friend.


thank you so much for guide it really helped me understand how the platform works and i really appreciate your kind words and your efforts explaining the issue to me initially it was kind of rough for me when i saw comments first time after the post went live but the comments out on this post helped me alot

A couple quotes from the guidelines of this site.

    > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

    > Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

    > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

    > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This reply is as much deserving of a flag as any. Please be more kind; it really is worth the effort.

You are mostly correct, but no rule exists in absolution, and my words while harsh are neither snarky nor clever.

I really am hoping my comment reaches that curious soul, because I really believe kindness alone is insufficient given the context and behavior. Their failure is a failure of expectation. The way to correct for poorly aligned expectations is harshness, otherwise known as tough love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tough_love


"I've seen a lot of bitching about this lately. You will continue to be flagged... You have a karma of 3, therefore you are a worthless spambot."

If you really want to say that this is an attempt to reach out and teach a curious soul with tough love, then I believe you, because you've asked me to. But forgive me if the sheer crass of your words makes this a little hard to buy.

Was it really love going through your mind when you typed those words, or were you trying to put down someone who you thought deserved to be put down, and "tough love" came as a later, retroactive justification?

I choose to believe your word regardless, but I would urge you to take heed of the "love" part of "tough love" more, next time.


> I choose to believe your word regardless, but I would urge you to take heed of the "love" part of "tough love" more, next time.

Why? If that is not the correct answer why would I supply more of the wrong answer?

In my experience encountering people who inject themselves into conversations where they were never invited to impart their unwanted tangential wisdom they are almost always unmedicated ADHD or on the spectrum. This is actually one of the top diagnostic criteria for ADHD evaluations.


As a fellow muppet (though of a different species), I applaud both your firmness and your restraint. Well done.

A record-breaking electric race car which is probably the fastest track car in the world, at least on some tracks. The distinguishing feature is an insanely powerful fan on the bottom of the car which allows for “active downforce” that greatly increases [grip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downforce).

What I found really interesting was that despite the active downforce system making the car stupidly fast in every way, this actually makes the car easier to drive overall, since turning is more responsive, braking is more consistent, and even spins when you lose control of the car immediately stabilize.

Amazing machine. Further reading below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurtry_Sp%C3%A9irling


Is the file still fairly readable as plain text when opened with any old text editor? Is this asking too much?

Too long to fit in title.

"List of people who have held constitutional office in all three branches of the United States federal government"


I don't game much nowadays; can I just use this to replace my monitor, and work within high fidelity VR?

You could do it, but the resolution isn't high enough for it to be a good experience. (2160x2160 per eye sounds like a lot, but with a 110 degree fov it's only ~19 pixels per degree. Which is like sitting very close to a 27" 720p monitor.)

Usually the pixel density is higher in the center of the FOV though (more distortion due to the lenses on the sides). It's what set the original Oculus apart from existing headsets at the time: cheap lenses and correct the distorsiin in software. It's also a feature, as the actual density is better in the center :)

I do wish they used micro-LEDs for that kind of display though. I guess that they could be manufactured at the same time as a metamaterial acting as a lens sitting on top.


For comparison, Apple’s Vision Pro has 3660x3200 pixels per eye.

Yep, across a smaller fov too (100 degree horizontal).

Seems like we need one more decade of oled panel and gpu improvements before we can have good enough density with a reasonable size and power consumption.

What hardware are people using to run modern VR?

1440p (2560x1440) is 3,686,400 pixels.

2160p (2160x2160) is 4,665,600 pixels, per eye, so 9,331,200 pixels.

This headset will require a million more pixels to be rendered than 4K. 9 Million pixels @ 144hz is no easy task.

My RTX 4080 (9800X3D) struggles with 4K gaming.


You render lower quality and scale the images up to native resolution, with filters to reduce any jagged artifacts. It's not ideal, and so even running at the "same" resolution, the 2d monitor looks better then it does in the headset.

But the immersion is enough that you forget about it and just enjoy the content, as long as it's comfortable enough


you can even replace the whole computer if you tinker enough, since it runs Linux. whether or not that is a good idea in principle with _any_ vr headset is debatable.

AR glasses are much more suited towards that vertical at a lower cost, yet imo still struggle to be compelling in productivity.


Also, if the concern here is safety, open models completely derail that.

Even if your someone who thinks open models are good for safety overall, a private model exposed only by an API point at least gives somebody control. How we should use that control is debatable, but at least it's there. Once you release that control by making a model open, you can't take it back.

If we think AI safety doesn't require closed weights, we should collectively decide on that and then move forward from there. But it shouldn't be something decided by default, by a few people from a few companies. We all have to live with the consequences of a choice like that, and since it is irreversible, we shouldn't decide it without consensus first.


the ntsb model has been quite effective at creating safety through analysis of failures in the extremely transparent and public eye.

i dont see a reason to think private regulation will do anything but give people explosive diarrhea or drop the doors off of planes.

weve already seen how bad it is when companies regulate themselves without public oversight. catastrophic implosions of deep sea submarines and agents hacking systems to hide cheating come to mind

the argument should be flipped on its head that by some magic keeping these tests and training protocols private is safer than making them extremely public. The experiment in private regulation has been a drastic failure across the board, and we shouldnt have tried it without consensus


Maybe a dumb question but how is NVIDIA increasing the total supply of money? Only the fed can actually order more money to be "created". Private companies can only work within the existing supply, that is, their reserves, no?

All debt is money. Anybody can create money, the trick is getting other people to accept it.

Nvidia is vendor financing its output.

An ai company order $100m of GPUs. Nvidia delivers and holds onto that debt as an asset - like a bank loan.

The production company uses AI to create better plant and purchases $100m of AI tokens to do so. The ai company hold that debt like a bank loan

Nvidia requests $100m of production based on its $100m of orders. The production company holds that debt like a bank loan.

You now have a monetary loop. Take a single $10 bank deposit and Nvidia pays the production company, who pays the ai company who pays Nvidia. Run that round the circle a few million times and everybody has been paid.

Rinse and repeat.


In principle you need a banking license in order to create money, so not "anybody" can create money. For example, I can't, and neither can you (unless you're a bank, which I suspect you're not_.

If you work for me and I owe you, that’s money.

You can sell that debt on to somebody else in exchange for goods and services.

That’s all money is - a circulating debt.


Not necessarily, could also be IOU, but usually today its the local money from a state/gov - you could also sign up for working for "1 liter of milk,3 potatoes etc."

His point is that vendor loans are a way to get around the banking license restriction. Of course this only works between two entities, not a general customer base. They get around that problem by pumping their valuation on the stock market where anyone can join.

You should educate yourself about accounting.

First, under US GAAP rules (ASC 606), you cannot recognize revenue from a vendor-financed sale unless it meets certain criteria, the biggest one of which is: it has to be probable that the buyer will actually pay you. If a default is likely, revenue recognition is deferred until cash changes hands.

Nvidia's massive revenue is therefore not from a bunch of dubious vendor-financed sales to counterparties who don't have the money to pay and need a fraudulent scheme to make the arrangement work. Furthermore, Nvidia, by its own disclosure, indicates that when it extends financing to customers, they pay, on average, within 2 months (53 days to be exact). So these are not years-long extensions of credit.


"Create money" here doesn't mean literally fluffing the balance sheet like when the fed prints money (which would have accounting differences), it means spending the same money more rapidly than otherwise. This is NVidia's personal contribution to increasing the economy's Money Multiplier [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_multiplier], which effectively increases the money supply from the broader economy's perspective.

You're conflating the money multiplier and velocity. They aren't the same thing. The multiplier is about banks turning reserves into deposits via lending while "spending the same money more rapidly" is velocity.

This doesn't apply to Nvidia extending trade credit and this description of bank money creation isn't even the accepted version today anyway.

Regarding velocity: a receivable on Nvidia's books isn't in M1 or M2 and nobody accepts it as payment. The AI company will still settle its bills with vendors and pay its employees in bank deposits. The "$10 running round the circle a million times" story is just netting. Clearinghouses have done this for centuries with literally 0 effect on the money supply.

If the OP's production company can't actually deliver $100 million of goods, someone has to write it down and no amount of velocity makes the company solvent. Net-60 payment terms are ordinary trade credit that any major B2B supplier extends. It's no different for Boeing, Caterpillar or [name a major manufacturer). If you're going to call this "money creation," you're saying that every net-30 or net-60 invoice is "money creation" too, which is ridiculous because it's patently false.

None of this is to say that there aren't legitimate circularity concerns about Nvidia, particularly around its equity stakes coming back as GPU orders. There are. But even those are about revenue quality and counterparty concentration, not monetary aggregates. Trying to make this a monetary argument when it's not actually weakens the circularity argument.


> doesn't apply to Nvidia extending trade credit

Of course it does. It's M4. Which turns into M3 through the money markets. Which creates M1 through banks.

Nvidia extending commitments creates M1 via a similar mechanism to the Fed buying Treasuries, thereby increasing deposits at the Federal Reserve (MB) which in turn prompts banks to increase M1.

> and this description of bank money creation isn't even the accepted version today anyway

What description? Most money in modern economics is created by banks. But nothing requires that to be the main mode. We're nowhere close to it, but a high-tariff economy would be expected to rely more on producers than consumers and thus their credit versus consumer deposits.

> If the OP's production company can't actually deliver $100 million of goods, someone has to write it down and no amount of velocity makes the company solvent

The $500 billion isn't net-sixty trade credit, it's long-term commitments for capital expenditure by third parties.

> Trying to make this a monetary argument when it's not actually weakens the circularity argument

No? They're separate issues.

Credit creates money. That's real and separate from to whom one is extending credit, in Nvidia's case, to its customers so they can buy more from Nvidia.


> It's M4. Which turns into M3 through the money markets. Which creates M1 through banks.

M3 hasn't been published in the US since 2006 and M4 has never been published publicly in the US. Aggregates don't turn into one another like they're moving on a conveyer belt. They're just classification buckets. If you have a dollar in a checking account, it's in M1, M2, M3 and M4 at the same time.

A purchase commitment or a capacity guarantee on Nvidia's balance sheet is just a contract. It isn't in any aggregate, it isn't traded in a money market and nobody accepts it as payment.

> ...via a similar mechanism to the Fed buying Treasuries, thereby increasing deposits at the Federal Reserve (MB) which in turn prompts banks to increase M1

Sorry but this is just wrong. Only the Fed creates reserves. Nvidia signing a contract doesn't do anything at the Fed.

Banks create deposits when they lend and they're constrained by capital and loan demand, not a reserve ratio. Since 2008, reserves have gone up 10x and M1 hasn't. See "Money creation in the modern economy". The multiplier theory as an explanation of how money gets created has been dead for years.

> The $500 billion isn't net-sixty trade credit

I wasn't even talking about this. My comment addressed the OP's argument that Nvidia is holding customer debt as a bank-like asset. That debt is receivables and it's 53 days on average, not years. The $500 billion in the article is mostly bank and private credit cash being loaned to Nvidia's customers and Nvidia providing backstops and guarantees. So if money is being created here, it's the lenders who are creating it, not Nvidia. In this case, Nvidia isn't a bank, it's a credit enhancer.

The legitimate concern is that Nvidia's guarantees are encouraging lenders to lend money to neoclouds on better terms than they otherwise would get (or should get if you want to make that argument). But that's not money creation and trying to pretend that it is only distracts from the real issues.


> Aggregates don't turn into one another like they're moving on a conveyer belt

Conveyor belt is wrong. The term you're looking for is transmission channels. MB is turned into M1 through lending. M3 is turned into M1 through collateralisation and demand stimulation, among other effects.

> If you have a dollar in a checking account, it's in M1, M2, M3 and M4 at the same time.

Yes.

> A purchase commitment or a capacity guarantee on Nvidia's balance sheet is just a contract. It isn't in any aggregate

Of course it is. Why do you think the SPVs want the commitment? They turn around and issue commercial paper and get bank loans and get bonds underwritten against those commitments. All of which turns into checking account deposits. Those SPVs also get a credit rating which lets them sign construction contracts which builders turn around and turn into deposits.

> Banks create deposits when they lend and they're constrained by capital and loan demand, not a reserve ratio

Banks are constrained by capital and liquidity requirements, on one hand, and loan demand, on the other hand.

> if money is being created here, it's the lenders who are creating it, not Nvidia. In this case, Nvidia isn't a bank, it's a credit enhancer

Yes. When the Fed buys Treasuries and increases a bank's reserves at the Fed, it's not actually doing anything in the real economy. The banks then have to turn around and increase lending. If, as you noted, loan demand is stagnant, they have to cut prices, i.e. rates.

The Economist is comparing Nvidia "enhancing" credit conditions in a manner analogous to the way the Fed does. By creating a base that stimulates lending.

> that's not money creation and trying to pretend that it is only distracts from the real issues

It's absolutely money creation in the way a central banker or anyone in the money markets would talk about it.


> The term you're looking for is transmission channels. MB is turned into M1 through lending. M3 is turned into M1 through collateralisation and demand stimulation, among other effects.

"Transmission channels" are how policy (rates, credit, etc.) affects the economy, not how aggregates convert into each other.

MB doesn't get "turned into" M1 by lending. Banks don't lend reserves to non-banks. The reserves stay inside the banking system. Lending creates M1 and reserves are provided to match.

I see the point you're trying to make about M3. Instruments like commercial paper can serve as collateral for bank loans that create deposits, but that still isn't conversion. It's new deposit creation with a broad money instrument as collateral.

> Of course it is. Why do you think the SPVs want the commitment? They turn around and issue commercial paper and get bank loans and get bonds underwritten against those commitments. All of which turns into checking account deposits. Those SPVs also get a credit rating which lets them sign construction contracts which builders turn around and turn into deposits.

The commitment isn't in any aggregate. It's collateral or credit support for instruments that are (the SPV's commercial paper and the resulting bank deposits).

That's what I mean by Nvidia being a credit enhancer. You've now agreed the money is created by the lenders and Nvidia is the enhancer. That's what I said two comments ago, so what's left is semantics.

> Yes. When the Fed buys Treasuries and increases a bank's reserves at the Fed, it's not actually doing anything in the real economy. The banks then have to turn around and increase lending. If, as you noted, loan demand is stagnant, they have to cut prices, i.e. rates.

> The Economist is comparing Nvidia "enhancing" credit conditions in a manner analogous to the way the Fed does. By creating a base that stimulates lending.

The Fed changes the risk-free rate for the whole economy. Nvidia is compressing the credit spread for a specific set of borrowers by absorbing their tail risk.

That makes Nvidia less like a central bank than a guarantor. The better analogues are Fannie and Freddie, or a monoline insurer. A guarantor's business looks free until the tail risks it took on turn out to be correlated which is what happened to the monolines in 2007.

That's precisely the scenario the Economist piece is actually worried about (the guarantees coming due at the same time Nvidia's own sales weaken).

> It's absolutely money creation in the way a central banker or anyone in the money markets would talk about it.

Central bankers would describe this as easing financial conditions or enabling credit creation, not money creation.


This was a fun thread to lurk on but it's kinda fascinating that there is so much debate about something that should be seemingly well known and documented. It's like having a couple of software engineers debate what e.g. a Java static initializer does :-)

I'm a bit shocked that this comment got flagged and went dead -- it might or might not be correct in its claims, but flagging it seems ridiculous to me.

If the debt cancels out doesn't this mean that there was no debt ?

> If the debt cancels out doesn't this mean that there was no debt ?

No. For the same reason that oxygen being transported into and out of the body doesn't mean there was no oxygen.


I’m guessing it doesn’t “cancel out” due to interest.

> Only the fed can actually order more money to be "created"

No. Most money in modern economies is created by private parties [1].

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...


Private Banks.

They are regulated as bank under fed.


> Private Banks

Currently. But nothing requires is. Banks can uniquely create M1. Nvidia is creating M4, which turns into M2 through the money markets, which turns into M1 at banks. It's more convoluted and limited than the Fed creating monetary base to increase M1. But the net effect is similar–more M1.


NV gives out a $100 to Party A, who puts it in their bank.

Bank takes $90 of that deposit (assuming 10% fractional reserve rule, no idea what the actual number is), and loans it out to party B, who pays it into either the same or another bank. Same rules apply -- except now it's down to $81 being loaned out, and so on and so forth, until that 100$ generated $1000 in total bank deposits.

edit: of course, it's never actually directly like this, a lot of other factors are involved, maybe the money is spent, maybe no one wants to borrow it, etc etc -- so it's more complicated but that's I think what they mean



Yup. Reserve requirements are functionally obsolete and never worked particularly well in the first place. Capital and liquidity requirements are far more robust and fine tuned.

That was my intuition at first too, but the original comment specified that they weren't borrowing all this money they're spending. The article also says how this is part of NVIDIA's strategy to enable demand, not create it, so supposedly these investments into their customers are actually going straight to paying for things.

Even if this money eventually gets loaned out eventually by one of NVIDIA's customers putting it into a bank, it isn't NVIDIA inflating the money supply, it's the borrowers, no? Or is this an ineffective way to look at things?


There is no such thing as fractional reserve banking. The multiplier is a myth.

Quite why this persists when the Bank of England debunked it in 2014 [0] is anybody’s guess.

Just another of those concepts that is neat, plausible and wrong.

[0]: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...


> There is no such thing as fractional reserve banking

Yes, there is. We just changed how we measure the fraction from a crude one like a reserve requirement (which takes zero account of asset quality or funding source) to finer and more-robust ones like capital and liquidity reqirements.

Banks still have to hold reserves. And those required reserves constrain their lending and thus the amount of money they can create. The limits just aren't the old-school reserve requirement.


They don’t constrain the quantity of lending. They only change the price.

Liability side controls don’t work.


> They don’t constrain the quantity of lending. They only change the price

Which country's capital and liquidity requirements are you thinking of?

Because Basel III dictates ratios. These are hard limits on lending.


Loans create deposits, deposits are used to buy bank capital issued by banks.

There’s no hard limits. They are ratios which are preprepared because a bank knows how big its sales pipeline is and that takes time to complete.

Nothing is limited in quantity. Even the silly SLR they have in the US is a pricing limit, not a quantity - as we see every time somebody moans about how much the deficit has gone up.


> There’s no hard limits. They are ratios

Ratios are limits!

> Nothing is limited in quantity

Of course it is. At a certain point, compliance will say you literally cannot issue loans of certain types because of capital or liquidity ratios. If compliance fails to do that, regulators come in and yell at everyone.


I make $100 of loans, that creates $100 of deposits which move around.

The capital ratio is 20%. I sell $20 of capital in exchange for $20 of deposits which are deleted.

And then I do the same tomorrow.

All ratios met. No limit on loans.


Any time sometime makes a loan at a bank, that money is created. An accompanying debt is also created. It's like matter and antimatter. And when the debt is repaid, the matter and antimatter disappear again.

If they’re effectively guaranteeing $500B in loans that adds close to $500B to M1, basically, that banks were not otherwise providing or loaning - at least that was my calculation.

> Only the fed can actually order more money to be "created".

If you go to a bank and get a loan, that is literally money that did not exist before you got a loan. People think that you are borrowing money that somebody else put in the bank, but that's not true. Banks can lend out a lot more money than people put into them.


Every form of lending that is specified via currency increases the supply.

If I give you GPUs worth $1bn, but take 100m payments for 11 years, then during that time you can use your other mony to buy other things that arent GPUs

If we stop after the 11 years and dont make new loans, the supply has shrunk back


I think at the top level between Govt and Industry and understanding has been reached that AI industry will be backstopped

Banks create money when issuing a loan. This is how fractional reserve banking works. They lend money they don't have (most of). This is institutionalized fraud, and it's been standard operating procedure for centuries.

But the fraction to be kept in reserve has been zero for 4-5 years.

Almost like the concept is complete bunkum.

It’s been zero in the UK for hundreds of years.


that.. doesn't make it better

It was replaced by other mechanisms. It’s not literally zero any kind of reserves.

I’m not worried about the lack of reserve, i’m worried about the money shell game where private companies can drive inflation or deflation whichever serves their profit margins best.

The 2008 global financial crisis was a result of this, so not a made up worry.


> The 2008 global financial crisis was a result of this, so not a made up worry

The GFC would not have been prevented by a reserve requirement. The problem didn't originate in the banking system, and transmission to the banking and payment systems wasn't reliant on leverage per se.


> The GFC would not have been prevented by a reserve requirement.

Who said anything about that?

> The problem didn't originate in the banking system

I guess i consider mortgage lending part of the banking system, but no matter - my point is it was created by financial institutions lending in ways that created money, helped their bottom line in the short term, and were unaccountable. That’s why i’m worried about how much of the US economy is created by private companies creating money out of thin air by loaning in loops.


Private banks increase money supply by lending. If 10 people deposit $1000 in a bank, it can loan $9000 to an 11th person. Now the economy has $19000 total.

> Private banks increase money supply by lending. If 10 people deposit $1000 in a bank, it can loan $9000 to an 11th person

It's the other way around. When a bank loans someone $1,000, they create a $1,000 deposit (their liability) and a $1,000 asset (their loan). Loans create deposits.

The Treasury can mint coin. But that's basically negligible in modern economies.


The $9000 has to be paid back, and then some. I sure hope you aren't an accountant.

But for the duration, there is more money. This isn’t some crank theory, it’s orthodox economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Yeah, we all know what fractional reserve banking is. But a debt exists at the same time and the idea is the money that was lent builds something, creating value. Let me borrow some gold so I can use my herbalism expertise to make some potions and sell them for a price that is greater than the sum of ingredients. That's how value is created. Saying loaning money inflates money de facto is disingenuous. Wealth is being created on the other side via goods and services.

You seem to be saying that money is created and that's okay. You agree with GP.

wealth is created by loaning money.

wealth is created by creating goods and providing services. money is created by loaning money.

I learned about this concept in college macroeconomics. I asked this exact question and the TA said “yeah I guess repaying debt is like destroying money” as if they had never thought of that before. The idea of lending money increasing the money supply is definitionally true.

> the TA said “yeah I guess repaying debt is like destroying money” as if they had never thought of that before

They shouldn't have been a TA. Modern money is destroyed in three ways: through taxation, defaults and the extinguishing of debts.


Taxation destroys money?

Yes, the government doesn’t have a checking account. When it spends money, that money is created and its balance sheet grows. When it receives taxes the balance sheet shrinks as the money is destroyed. If there’s a gap it gets filled by issuing bonds. Thats the national debt. These are conventions, not absolute rules, so governments can go rogue but it doesn’t end well

And when debt is wiped out through bankruptcy that inflation remains.

> when debt is wiped out through bankruptcy that inflation remains

Bankruptcy is deflationary. The same way credit creation makes money bankruptcy (and any other reduction of debt, including through repayment) destroys it. It's why financial crises were often followed by deflation in gold-based economies.


But at that point in time, there's 19k in money. And future repayments of that loan back to the bank are less valuable to it than that current value figure. Because a bank can do a lot more shenanigans with that loan figure than it can with just the deposits.

It's a simplification to help people understand, but this is in the spirit of how things work because the value in the economy is not the money, but the goods and services that get created in the economy as a consequence of it. Most constructive uses of financial instruments in the markets (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc) are about efficient reallocation of money to enable value creation while balancing different risks, and people who provide this money indirectly benefit from this value creation via interest, dividends, selling stock at a higher price, etc.

Now to expand GP's example (still simplified):

- A borrows $100k money to pay B toward building a house. B puts $100k in their bank.

- C borrows $90k from B's bank toward building a house to pay D. D puts $90k in their bank.

- etc

So, houses were created (or other services were provided), and that's the real multiplicative factor. If banks loan out 90% of the cash stored (i.e. keep 10% in reserve [1]), the multiplicative factor of value creation in the economy is 10x the original amount of cash deposited in the first bank.

Now, if all of us withdrew our savings at once or sold all our stocks at once, we would have an economic shock analogous to that which resulted the Great Depression. That's why for banks, we have FDIC insurance - to mitigate such a panic so that money can serve its value-multiplicative role when it's not being actively used for anything else by the person owning the money. That's also why a positive (but low) inflation was originally considered economically healthy - so that people put their money in banks/market rather than under their mattresses gradually losing value. When interest rates are low, that encourages people to put their money into riskier (non-FDIC-insured) investments with higher growth potential, like a balanced portfolio of stocks/bonds/etc to avoid losing value to inflation, resulting in more economic growth.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking


And thus $9k of <something they got that $9k worth of value for> is injected into the economy, either assets sold or work performed.

Eventually

Which is, you know, the entire risk that people are worried about.


Ummm. No. I suggest you research how balance sheets work.

Unfortunately this kind of thinking is why so many people seem to think the big AI labs are totally killing it the second they make a “profit” on inference. Yes if you ignore the balance sheet all looks fine. Unfortunately companies go bankrupt because of their balance sheets, not operating profits and losses. You can make money on the direct COGS on every transaction and still be bankrupt.


You should research economics. That $9000 can build a house that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Then it gets paid back. $10000 in the bank and a $9000 house.

They aren’t; the parent comment is incorrect. It’s safer to say Nvidia is encouraging the money that already exists to be deployed on AI buildouts.

But everyone is now chasing the same opportunity (AI and its dependencies like hardware and power) that will drive prices higher in those sectors until supply responds (or demand disappears).


I've always found it interesting when corporations start acting like public institutions. When traditionally philosophical, social contract ideas apply to things like corporate governance. Or like here, where private structures get powerful and important enough to resemble government structures.

The ideas we deal with when we discuss society and organization aren't exclusive to government, they relate to human nature in general. I wonder if in the future we will have more discussion of power and how to organize it in corporations, similar to what we discuss today about government.


Well the key difference making any superficial similarities fall apart is Nvidia does not have neutral economy-wide goals of maintaining small+stable inflation, near-full employment and stabilizing financial institutions like the Fed does. Nvidia is entirely self interested in protecting their own shareholder value (that includes the incestuous web of investments ultimately ending up spent on their GPUs).

The structure of the Fed is setup the way it is to limit the sort of self-serving, myopic political micromanaging that could be damaging to the economy at large. And, unlike a beneficiary of rapid growth like Nvidia, has (historically) tried to identify potential indicators warning of unsustainable bubbles that could lead to financial contagion and tries to mitigate that risk using the limited monetary tools available and their public soapbox.

A similar decision making structure would potentially be very undesirable to Nvidia shareholders as caution over long time horizons would likely produce what they would consider an excessively conservative, defensive strategy to avoid putting too much air into the bubble too quickly (at the expense of their valuation).


Corporations certainly don't have the same goals government does, but human nature applies universally.

I'm not saying that corporations should have exactly the same rules and structure as government does, but perhaps many of the ideas used to design governments can be borrowed.


I would love for good governance principles to seep into corporations rather than the other way around. Seems about time the direction reversed.

USA is trying to become corporatocracy

In a country without religion, banner or ideology to unite the people in current-and-coming turbulent times, the bet is made on "unite under money, or have no money left"

the way to fight it is to be principled even in front of cheaper options - and to support others like you


To be clear: I'm not trying to advocate for more corporate power.

> I wonder if in the future we will have more discussion of power and how to organize it in corporations, similar to what we discuss today about government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A64rR5Dp07s

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale. And I won't have it!

Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do."


The governments of today weren't formed out of "discussions of power"

The American Revolution was very much a discussion about power. Of course, it wasn't just a discussion (we had to fight a war to defend the new form of government), but it was driven by the same concerns about the distribution of power.


Yeah its soooo interesting! Totally not dystopian, just soooo interesting and fascinating to ponder these scenarios in which corporations hold equal power to national governments!

Just such a curious scenario to let your mind wander about, how society would look like in these scenarios!

/s

I'm honestly so sick of the suspense of disbelief on this site, how is this more "interesting" to you, than the absolute sheer terror you should feel about going back to feudalism and serfdom? A typical western national state ensures that you have basic rights as a human being and aren't exploited to the death by non-government entities.


You're catastrophizing and misreading the original comment in an uncharitable way.

I'm not advocating for corporations to have equal power with governments, though. I think that's generally a terrible idea.

Looking at any organization with power and people involved, perhaps we can use the same ideas that traditionally apply to government in more places. That's all I'm saying.

This is not some mindless intellectual exercise to distract from how things are. In fact, as a proposal for how to reform corporate power, it's the opposite.

(Also, even though I think corporate power should be limited to a very specific arm of society, and that we shouldn't encourage more corporate power, you are greatly exaggerating. Feudalism and the abolition of human rights are not right around the corner.)


Lighten up

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