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Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

thewalrus.ca

371–380 of 518 posts

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#371

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More money inflates the supply of money. This is why cryptocurrencies that burn crypto are considered deflationary. These Econ professors are responsible for inflating a giant bubble based on their politically motivated propaganda. Inflation is not about prices, it’s about simple math. Printing dollars out of thin air, makes the ones in your pocket less powerful. But if you are a the direct beneficiary of the newly p…

> More money inflates the supply of money. This is why cryptocurrencies that burn crypto are considered deflationary. Crypto isn't in a vaccuum. If the only currency in the world was bitcoin, sure, call it deflationary. But compared to a decade ago, there are far more dollars floating around thanks to crypto. Not only are there are the rich people holding dollars and other currency, or gold, etc, but we've invented a…

> there are far more dollars floating around thanks to crypto

Uh no, cryptocurrencies can't generate USD. But if you meant "dollars" as a generic term for currency, then sure, kinda yeah, to the degree that cryptocurrencies are actually working as currencies (which they mostly are not).

Anyway, the "deflationary" claim is internal to a cryptocurrency. Nobody is asserting that cryptocurrencies cause deflation of USD.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#372

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And the real value of debts fall, including student loan debt, housing debt and even consumer credit. I think we're going to hit a wall soon where we either need to forgive or inflate debts away. The alternative is likely to be a crushing depression and fiscal austerity that is much less than any of the downsides of inflation. If you're a largely debt free upper-mid to upper class tech person then the your personal v…

Housing debt is mainly held by the wealthier half of society. Credit card interest rates, as well as other unsecured consumer lines of credit, are so incredibly high that inflation is far from reducing the value of those debts, it merely slightly slows their rate of growth. If you think inflation's impact on debt favours the poor, you have to look at the interest rates available for borrowing. Poor people get loans w…

I never mentioned the poor. I'm considering mostly the bulk of middle-class Millennials who went to college with crushing student loan debt who can't save up enough to buy a house.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#373

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This deflation is bad meme comes straight from the big international bankers of the early 20th century (JPM et al.). They cared mostly about liquidity and stable exchange rates. Unless you are one of them, please stop parroting "would be extremely bad". Would it be different from now? Probably. Extremely bad? For whom?

People who have debt is the canonical set for whom deflation would be bad Including everyone who has a mortgage: your payments stay the same, but you earn less, so they take up a larger portion of your income. Naturally this can lead people who have debts that they could have serviced without deflation now cannot service them, so they go bankrupt. This also happens with any company that has debt (which is pretty much…

Ok, so full disclosure -- Austrian monetary theory makes sense to me in a way that no other form of macroeconomic theory has since. I'm open to being convinced that monetary inflation is a necessary or good thing, but I haven't yet.

Most of the arguments I've heard seem to take the form of -- we've been doing this thing (increasing the money supply) and if we stop, everyone who has debt is suddenly going to be in a lot of pain. I get that, and I agree, it makes sense.

Maybe you or someone can help me out here -- what I don't get is why we need to keep increasing the supply of money in the first place. Forgetting the situation that we're in at this point (where we don't want to stop increasing the money supply), what bad thing would happen if we had said from the start: here's the number of dollars, that's it? If we have more people, those dollars will get more valuable, because more people will want dollars. If we have more goods, those dollars will get more valuable, because they'll be scarcer relative to the goods.

I've heard and understand the argument that people don't like having their salaries cut, and that's something that would have to happen sometimes if money kept getting more valuable. But I don't see how that's really a big issue. Companies that paid their employees too much, and ran out of profits, would simply go out of business, no? The employees would then look for jobs elsewhere, and the market would be paying a bit lower. After a certain amount of time, I expect business owners and employees would get used to the reverse of the current situation -- you get a pay cut every year, unless you're increasing your value to the company, in which case you keep the same salary (or maybe get a small raise). It feels like the whole sticky wages argument is kind of based on claiming that the average citizen is like a child that thinks that water in a taller, thinner glass is more, which, while I'm sure is true for a few folks out there, doesn't seem to me like a good enough reason to do something as drastic as deciding that we need to continuously increase the money supply. People very clearly understand that with inflation, you may get a raise and still be poorer.

If "sticky wages" were the only consideration, maybe it would make sense to increase the money supply, sure. But I think the Austrian economists have a good argument that doing so adds an external factor into economic calculation that makes planning for the future harder -- you now not only have to try to predict how the prices of goods and services and so on will change due to supply and demand, you also have to factor into your prediction any distortions due to the central bank's changing monetary policy. Keeping the money supply static turns one big variable into a constant.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#374
post #356

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The thing is it wasn't flowing out, except in some specific ways, and in spite of decades of low to virtually zero interest rates. Every QE event has led to a ballooning of the stock market and asset holdings on things that can be mortgaged, which are both things that disproportionately benefit only some of 'everyone'. This is the point I'm making. Interest rates stopped being a lever a long time ago, whether by choi…

I agree, it doesn't seem to be working as well as you'd hope. I wonder how much of that is due to people not taking advantage of the opportunity for cheap money, either because they don't know about it, or have no ideas how to use it.

I mean, like I said most people only have access to expensive (but readily given) credit, because they have nothing to secure a loan against. Low central interest rates make the risk/reward of handing out high interest credit cards to high risk customers slanted towards the reward, as we saw in 2008. Some of that got clamped down on, obviously, but the basic incentives haven't really changed.

I think the immediate issue for this question is the same as it's ever been, but made worse by the growth of asset value. For most of the 20th century, since "everyone should be able to buy a home" became a government meme, the way out of that trap was to leverage yourself into asset ownership with a mortgage.

Now that's becoming increasingly out of reach to people in an economy largely built on service jobs that pay poorly on one side, and an asset bubble that they can't pop without blowing up the economy on the other.

So imo it's some combination of "people have no idea how to use it" and "even if they do it may not be possible for them to pull it off unless the stars align now."

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#375

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Yup. The kernel of truth behind Austrian theories of macroeconomics/the business cycle is that interest-rate based policy setting is inherently an unstable system. If the central bank makes policy errors that fail to stabilize the underlying target (whether inflation, nominal income, exchange rates, whatever) the whole system starts spiraling away from that unstable equilibrium point, and the subsequently needed corr…

Austrian theories appeal to me/seem correct beyond just a kernel, but I’d consider myself an amateur/haven’t read enough to be confident about my opinion. Specifically, the emphasis on relative value seems correct, the emphasis on the importance of keeping pricing signals pure/unaffected by artificial monetary supply changes to effectively allocate resources seems correct, the argument that market incentives exist fo…

I found Simon Kuznets multi-volume piece on economics (including cycles) really interesting ~35 years ago. Many U.S. university libraries have a copy if/when You want to peruse it - it greatly expanded my thinking about those systems regardless if I am a "True Believer" or not.

Those volumes can be pretty challenging at times, but extremely in-depth. Fascinating intro to cyclic theories of economics for a person who tires of business/econ literature not having an engineering perspective (if it's correct or not, at least it's defended - make up your own perspective on the material presented).

FWIW, a minor comment by Paul Hawken, writing in CoEvolution Quarterly (Best Periodical Ever in my opinion), is what alerted me to Kuznets.

Edit: Adding that Kuznets is a major influence on Austrian economics, and has influenced U.S. economics at high levels. Edit01: minor English corrections.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. The kernel of truth behind Austrian theories of macroeconomics/the business cycle is that interest-rate based policy setting is inherently an unstable system. If the central bank makes policy errors that fail to stabilize the underlying target (whether inflation, nominal income, exchange rates, whatever) the whole system starts spiraling away from that unstable equilibrium point, and the subsequently needed corr…

No, they completely miss the point. The fundamental problem with money is that you can delay your spending indefinitively thereby breaking the concept of supply and demand. Imagine an economy where you are self sufficient and sell but never buy anything ( cough germany). You keep accumulating more and more money and you could in theory spend it all, thereby cause a huge amount of inflation. That is the core of the de…

Absolutely correct. Its why there is no correlation to inflation in the monetary aggregates. M1,M2,etc.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#377
post #230

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Economists were saying some time ago on NRP that inflation becomes a vicious circle when it encourages/forces employees to demand higher wages "because everything is more expensive", which in turns makes everything more expensive, because wages are higher now. I think we are already there, everyone is jumping ship to get a higher wage right now, rampant inflation is here to stay

This seems like an alarmist take, the truth is wages haven't been going up much and yet inflation was occurring regardless. What caused inflation then? Why do folks only ever worry about inflation when it comes to increasing the bottom wages?

They haven't? All I have been hearing for the last 2 years are minimum wage going to 15, and now 18 is the next target.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#378

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Japan says its economy has been in deflation since the 90s.[1] Everybody is working. Sure, the numbers aren't going up and there aren't constant booms of new companies being valued at 100 billion and exploding (which draws ire from economists and billionaire investors), but quality of life has been consistently high for normal people. Homelessness is barely present and people who want a job can find one quickly. If t…

Japan isn't a very good example because their economy has absolutely tanked because of their horrible monetary policy. Japan was in a liquidity trap caused by their low inflation for literally decades which caused their economy to grow barely 1% annually. The reason their unemployment rate is low is because they've been stuck in this rut for literally 30 years, so people have adjusted. That doesn't mean it isn't caus…

“Tanked” according to economists.

If the news weren’t telling us the economy tanked, nobody would be worried. Houses are affordable, jobs are everywhere, people aren’t going into lifelong debt because of medical issues.

In countries with inflation, the wealth divide is massive and growing. Wages might be up sometimes. But house prices and health insurance far outstrip any gains there. I guess milk is a little cheaper though. Maybe that tips the scales.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#379
This isn't talked about much but it has to be considered. There is a relationship between interest rates and the repayment rate of the 30 Trillion in US debt that's owed. Even a moderate increase in rates, to 5-6% (way short of almost 20% we saw under Volker), would be catastrophic in terms of being able to service the debt which would affect bond and treasury interest payments. Perhaps the Fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Continued inflation is the do-nothing outcome, which to me means it's more likely to happen.

Re: Have we been thinking about inflation all wrong?

#380
post #204

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I don't think that inflation is as easy to cause without a fresh supply of money. And you know who prints fiat money.

Inflation is easily caused without a fresh supply of money. Destroy your productive capacity => inflation.

No, money really is essential. If you destroy your productive capacity but money supply remains the same (which is honestly a bit odd, since real prices are always relative), then you get substitution effects that don't affect the general price level, only the price levels in particular segments of the economy. (I would expect the prices of products, capital goods and human capital to increase, and the price of commodities and goods related to distribution to decrease). Put differently, you'll have less exchange and will shift what you spend on, but the price levels will not show much of a sustained general increase.

The tricky part of inflation is that a lot of money exists on paper, and banks and even firms are more constrained by capital than we otherwise might wish to believe. (Though one good casualty of the pandemic has been the realization that banks are almost entirely unconstrained by reserve requirements, only by capital.) So when the money is sitting in some account bearing a small amount of interest at the Fed, that is low velocity and may not cause inflation. However, if that cash enters circulation (via, say, direct payments from the government), then suddenly the velocity is much higher, the money supply goes up and you have "too much money chasing too few goods."

Inflation is really always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

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