L
Lyn Alden
lynalden.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2019
Lyn Alden, an investment strategist, writes long essays on money, inflation, the dollar, and Bitcoin.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend it as some of the best commentary on the current US economy and macro topics.
207HN people shared it
137linked it in comments
188stories submitted
4.0Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system34 people · 362 points · first shared 2020 · 344 comments on HN
- 2The Ultimate Guide to Inflation20 people · 713 points · first shared 2021 · 343 comments on HN
- 3Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Isn’t a Problem20 people · 43 points · first shared 2021 · 16 comments on HN
- 4What is money, anyway?12 people · 489 points · first shared 2022 · 389 comments on HN
- 5The Global Dollar Short Squeeze11 people · 394 points · first shared 2020 · 211 comments on HN
- 6Banks, QE, and Money-Printing10 people · 214 points · first shared 2020 · 235 comments on HN
- 7Bitcoin: Addressing the Ponzi Scheme Characterization10 people · 39 points · first shared 2021 · 182 comments on HN
- 8Economic Japanification: Not What You Think8 people · 7 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 9Homepage8 people · first shared 2020
- 10Why This Is Unlike the Great Depression7 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Book: "Broken Money" by Lyn Alden7 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · 2 comments on HN
- 12Quantitative Easing, MMT, and Inflation/Deflation: A Primer7 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13Proof-of-Stake and Stablecoins: A Blockchain Centralization Dilemma6 people · 81 points · first shared 2021 · 146 comments on HN
- 14Most investments are bad. Here's why6 people · 51 points · first shared 2024 · 77 comments on HN
- 15Misconceptions About Bitcoin6 people · 8 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
nprz · 2021-12-10
Lyn Alden probably has some of the best commentary on the current state of the US economy. Would highly recommend checking out her blog if you're looking to learn more: https://www.lynalden.com/
toomuchtodo · 2022-06-16
Highly recommend https://www.lynalden.com/
jameslk · 2025-05-22
This present issue has been caused by decades of bad fiscal policy by both parties:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Here for example, the Congressional Budget Office, forecasted federal debt as a percent of GDP would continue to rise unchecked, back in 2023: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59014
The only presidential politician who sounded the alarm was Ross Perot, all the way back in the 90s.
Lyn Alden has been talking about this for a long time. If you want a good intro to the problem, I’d recommend this article of hers:
https://www.lynalden.com/september-2024-newsletter/
chiefalchemist · 2024-10-04
> by making real estate cheap again among other things
If this happens at scale, the system collapses. There's a reason The US Federal Reserve's target is positive 2% inflation. Why not 0? Why not negative 2%?
The reason is the financial system is dependent on "appreciation". Imagine a bank approving a loan and the collateral falls in value? And asset the loan acquired falls in value. Boom! The whole system is under water.
The USA has a housing supply problem for similar reasons. Property owners want the value of their assets to appreciate. Increase supply and that slows or stops.
Like it or not it's a Ponzi Scheme, and this is why the population crunch is a concern.
I went to a book tour stop of for this author + book and Princeton Univ a few months ago. Definitively recommended.
https://www.lynalden.com/broken-money/
robocat · 2024-05-04
About 3% of 60 to 64 year olds had $1M saved. Taking 4% out per year is $40k... that's not a great income.
And the demographic changes mean that future results will differ from past results.
As a middle-aged New Zealander I worry about:
(1) overinvestment in the US stock market especially as withdrawals hit in synchonicity,
(2) why bother saving? All indications here in New Zealand is that the combination of wealth taxes, capital gains taxes and means testing will take most of one's savings over time.
We can't fight demographics.
Great article on long term investing: "Most investments are actually bad" https://www.lynalden.com/most-investments-are-bad/
dpc_01234 · 2024-05-02
All world countries are operating on fiat currencies, that are inflated away at similar rates.
"financialization of housing" is basically the same thing as "FED". Absent value retaining money, flooded with worthless paper, people look for anything scarce they can park their savings in, turning a social necessity (housing) into savings account, and give into incentives to make it artificially scarce (like NIMBY). Historically (before fiat money) housing was a poor investment. https://www.lynalden.com/most-investments-are-bad/
fuoqi · 2023-09-19
For all those who think that a high debt-to-GDP ratio is fine (put the meme picture here) and that the US will simply follow the Japan scenario for several decades at least (nothing great, but nothing catastrophic), I highly recommend to read this Lyn Alden's article: https://www.lynalden.com/economic-japanification/
To summarize it: Japan and US are in two very different situations, the former is one of the largest world's creditor nations, while the latter is THE largest world debitor nation. The reserve currency status, while quite useful for kicking the can down the road, makes situation exponentially more dangerous when the can will hit a wall.
ptero · 2023-08-08
While not specific to chipmaking, Lyn Alden's latest public newsletter on reshoring is, as always, excellent: https://www.lynalden.com/reshoring/
The relevant point is that while the manufacturing portion is real, successful reshoring also requires skilled labor. Skilled labor for fab production is not something US has now and it takes many years to grow; and it is not clear if the US has the desire and the will to foster this growth.
vishnugupta · 2023-03-28
If you've read BoE paper then I guess you are already at the 90th percentile.
Here are some interesting rabbit holes I've found to be useful.
1. Central Banking 101 [1]. A terrific no non-sense book. The author is an ex-central banker.
2. Same author's blog[2] and twitter[3] handle is full of good insights and details.
3. Lyn Alden[4] writes well but know that she is biased towards Bitcoin which sort of clouds her writings once in a while.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56863052-central-banking-101
[2] https://fedguy.com
[3] https://twitter.com/FedGuy12
[4] https://www.lynalden.com
coryfklein · 2023-01-30
> it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well
There's actually some companies that are making use of this "waste"! For example, you can take geo-agnostic computation (like crypto mining) with small bandwidth requirements and move it to literally be on-site. Then you power it with generators that are fed the natural gas instead of flaring it.
This can partially displace computation that otherwise would have used up higher-cost energy.
See [0] for the best example of this that I'm aware of. Section titled "How Bitcoin Uses Otherwise-Wasted Energy".
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
jc_811 · 2023-01-13
As a very general high-level view: the Treasury cannot print money. This is handled by the Federal Reserve (FED)
The FED creates money by Quantitative Easing (QE). However, this money goes to bank balance sheets and is not part of the "real" economy. Here is how it works: BigBank has a balance sheet with $100B of securities (such as treasury bills, mortgages, etc). What the FED does during QE is take these securities from BigBank in exchange for cash. So, just like that BigBank has $100B in new cash that has been "created" out of thin air.
Congress can also create new money by deficit spending.
For a much better and thorough breakdown on how this all works, here is a great reference: https://www.lynalden.com/money-printing/
surprisetalk · 2023-01-04
Good directories:
- https://indieweb.org
- Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195
My favorites:
- gwern: https://www.gwern.net
- Ben Kuhn: https://www.benkuhn.net
- Shtetl-Optimized: https://scottaaronson.blog
- Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com
- Lyn Alden: https://www.lynalden.com
- Beng Tan: https://bengtan.com/interesting-things/
- Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/
- Brian Hicks: https://bytes.zone
Me:
- https://taylor.town
yuan43 · 2022-09-28
It's a move designed to affect market psychology mainly. Multiple central banks have concluded that QE at best contributes marginally to the reduction of long term interest rates. People want something to be done, and BoE delivers.
It also shifts the discussion from "what's causing the fall of the pound and the rise of long term rates" to "what will be the effect of this new round of QE?"
To get a better picture, take a broader view. This move comes as all of the world's currencies are falling against the dollar. Why?
This article might be helpful:
https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/
abhinavkulkarni · 2022-09-27
You may want to read through blog of Lyn Alden: https://www.lynalden.com. She has good explanation of why US always runs deficit.
mudrockbestgirl · 2022-09-18
I'm assuming you mean that want to understand monetary policy, what makes money trustworthy/valuable, inflation, etc. Here are a few books that I thought were good, but I also wish I knew about a single better resource:
- The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (This also has a documentary)
- Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail by Ray Dalio (not directly about money but does a good job at explaining reserve currencies, types of currencies, debt cycles, inflation, all of which are related)
- What is Money, anyway? [0]
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/
thesausageking · 2022-07-27
This article by Lyn Alden is the best on the dollar as the US Currency Reserve I've read:
https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/
amorphic · 2022-05-12
A lot of people here seem to take the "Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and therefore is worthless" line.
I don't hold any bitcoin and I don't feel strongly either way. But this piece by Lyn Alden provides some good insights into situations where Bitcoin might be valuable and why it may well have a strong future. Particularly compared to other, less widely-held cryptocurrencies:
https://www.lynalden.com/gold-and-bitcoin/
thinkmassive · 2022-01-21
Lyn Alden has a lot of great content, start here: https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoins-network-effect/
soueuls · 2022-01-18
Lyn Alden - https://www.lynalden.com/ (finance)
Mr Money Mustache - https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ (unusual approach to minimalism and FIRE)
dustintrex · 2022-01-17
Lyn is one of the more thoughtful crypto bulls out there (admittedly a low bar), and the following post with its updates shows how her thinking has evolved.
https://www.lynalden.com/cryptocurrencies/
TL;DR stance as of July 2020: I like it as a small position within a diversified portfolio, without much concern for periodic corrections, using capital I’m willing to risk.
oraphalous · 2022-01-06
There are significant political and economic tradeoffs between POW and POS... I highly recommend this article for an analysis of these.
https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/
I suggest this analysis because folks tend to state their preference for POS while only mentioning the energy costs as the only factor in their calculation. I do think it worth considering these other tradeoffs as well.
paulpauper · 2021-12-26
Commodity cycles and price inflation are tightly correlated.
Next we can follow that logic to look at commodities. This chart shows the 5-year rolling change in CPI vs oil prices:
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/price-signal-cpi-vs-oil.pn…
This is not a tight correlation at all. All the evidence she gives is weak.
rsync · 2021-12-15
I prefer to get my economics pop-econ-theory from Lyn Alden.
She has a very good post about this same topic titled "The Global Dollar Short Squeeze":
https://www.lynalden.com/global-dollar-short-squeeze/
Recommended.
jkepler · 2021-12-06
Except that bitcoin fits none of the definitions of a ponzi scheme, unless you think money as a technology for storing wealth is a ponzi scheme.
For example, under the gold standard (1870s until 1913), the US saw gradual price deflation, meaning people expected their money to gradually grow in purchasing power, yet (amazingly) the economy grew! Turns out deflation isn't bad, even thought it may look like a ponzi to those who don't understand it.
https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-ponzi-scheme/
ineptech · 2021-11-24
> That's how inflation works.
May I recommend https://www.lynalden.com/quantitative-easing-mmt-inflation/
kipchak · 2021-11-16
I could see alternative currencies becoming and increasingly available option. Something like SDRs used by the IMF could emerge for example, made up of multiple international currencies. Not necessarily a replacement, but a decreasing reliance.
Russia, the EU and China are fairly aggressively de-dollarizing, and encouraging trading partners to do the same.[1][2] See CMIM for example in the Asia region, INSTEX in the EU to get around Iran sanctions and the creation of the "Petroyuan". Lyn Alden has a great overview.[4]
[1]https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2021-07-23_IF11885_09a6986fb2de22…
[2]https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/chiang-mai-initiative…
[3]https://infobrics.org/post/32689/
[4]https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/#fraying
jimbokun · 2021-11-16
I thought this chart captured the modern economic angst really well:
https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/dollar-crisis-income-vs-ex…
Concretely shows how one income used to be able to easily cover a family's expenses.
And how today a one income family is worse off today than 40 years ago in absolute terms.
And how the biggest family cost increase is healthcare, followed by college.
Things that have all been discussed in depth, but clarifying to see them on one simple chart.
jw1224 · 2021-10-17
> it won’t succeed as a currency
Whilst I can appreciate why people think it might not succeed as a mainstream consumer currency — do you recognise how successful it is becoming as an asset, like gold?
Worth a read: https://www.lynalden.com/gold-and-bitcoin/
lend000 · 2021-08-13
Recommend you take a look at this to see more factors involved in inflation, in a more quantitative light: https://www.lynalden.com/inflation/.
The reason CPI is a terrible metric is because measuring inflation is very difficult and somewhat arbitrary (see for example: hedonic adjustments). M2 is a significant, consistent, and logical factor. Even from 1980-1986, rapid changes in M2 consistently correspond to a change in inflation. But there are other factors, like real economic growth, population growth, changes in size of the labor force and velocity of money.
rebelos · 2021-07-01
A lot. Changes in policy cut the effective corporate tax rate down from ~40% around 1950 to where it is today. Lyn Alden covered this in an excellent post: https://www.lynalden.com/tax-shift/.