Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Inflation Day

 

Bad Democrat policies… they own it…





10 comments:

hoonose said...

Why did this not start in November 2020?
And could it be in any way related to the emergence of the vaccines?

Matt Franko said...

Well you had the Trump stimmy Dec 27th 2020 then the Biden stimmy late Feb 2021 …

Unprecedented fiscal expansion and telling people not to go to work if they could anyway avoid it…

Unprecedented fiscal expansion into a supply shock = “inflation!” = textbook MMT 101

Ahmed Fares said...

Unprecedented fiscal expansion into a supply shock = “inflation!” = textbook MMT 101

Just to be clear, when I wrote that inflation causes money printing and not the other way around, it means that's the way it usually happens. But money printing can also cause inflation, which is true for the above. The causality can run both ways.

In Zimbabwe, for example, it was the supply shock which pushed up prices and caused money printing, but then the government just kept on printing. They would have had inflation in any event, but the additional money printing made it worse. In that case, it wasn't an "either/or" but a "both/and".

Tom Hickey said...

IIRC, most hyperinflations (if not all) have resulted from printing money (often literally) to address a supply shock. Many of these supply shocks have resulting from an exogenous shock but not always. The Weimar inflation can be traced to policy imposed on post WWI Germany at Versailles. In Zimbabwe it was a result of poorly thought through policy decisions involving land reform that constrained supply. While such conditions can be address more successfully otherwise, e.g., price controls and rationing, they were addressed instead by increasing spending power, leading to a price spiral.

Now the supply shock is due to several major factors: 1) supply chains affected by the pandemic, an exogenous shock, which is happening in China again now as a result of policy decisions, 2) economic sanctions imposed unilaterally by the US and allies, which is partly exogenous and mostly policy-induced, and 3) energy supply constriction resulting from the switch to clean energy to address climate change, another exogenous shock, but which is chiefly policy-induced (and is now being reversed).

This has resulted in real constraints and political conditions that make it nearly impossible to navigate the ship of state through this storm without taking on water. Moreover, different countries addressing this shock based on national interest is making the international situation unstable, affecting other nations.

Matt Franko said...

A fiscal increase is not “printing money!”…

Matt Franko said...

“printing money!” is a figure of speech…

Matt Franko said...

In December and January just ended we had a balanced budget.., ie deficit was zero…

Matt Franko said...

If we have a fiscal balance would you Art Degree people still call that “printing money!”?

Wouldn’t you Art Degrees say we “didn’t print any money!” as the deficit was zero?

Matt Franko said...

George Harrison wrote that his guitar was gently weeping but would you Art degrees guys say that included his work on the song Helter Skelter it doesn’t sound gentle or weepy?

How do you guys know when the figure of speech applies or when it doesn’t?

I’m putting George’s work on Helter Skelter as a no … but I’d defer to you guys.,,

Peter Pan said...

"They're burning money!" could be a figure of speech that never caught on...