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Do you buy into the quantity theory of money? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money If

Do you buy into the quantity theory of money? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money If so, then a fixed money supply is necessarily deflationary in an expanding economy. Of course, by that same argument, the US should be experiencing massive inflation right now due to the actions of the government during the financial crisis which led to a tripling of the monetary base, and yet it never materialized...

unknown_apostle 9y ago
Inflation is very hard to truly understand and track: - Monetary inflation and price inflation are different things. Right now we have unprecedented monetary inflation in terms of base money, but almost no price inflation. - Price inflation is always a very non-linear function of its drivers. - Price inflation also doesn't have to be uniform. Some people would argue that the monetary measures taken after the financial crisis have already led to price inflation, namely price inflation of financial assets such as bonds and stocks. In this view, the money has been sloshing around the world as excess liquidity, being passed on like a hot potato that nobody wants to hold, propping up new bubbles but without leaving the financial system. - A simple quantity theory of money may not apply because we live in a complex credit based system. Base money is just a liability of the central bank. We don't pay and save much in base money, we pay and save mostly using liabilities of private banks. As long as the increases in base money don't trigger increases in these broader forms of money and credit (this is what it means when they say "the transmission mechanism has broken down" or "the velocity of money is too low"), we shouldn't normally expect any direct impact of base money increases on price inflation. About bitcoin: any healthy, advancing economy running mostly on actual bitcoins as a medium of exchange would probably see price deflation in terms of bitcoin. If we were to have technological progress like we had the last 50 years, the price deflation would probably be unprecedented. But if we could manage to piramid ever increasing amounts of credit on top of actual bitcoins and pay and save mostly in those credits, probably not so much :-)

unknown_apostle 9y ago

Inflation is very hard to truly understand and track: - Monetary inflation and price inflation are different things. Right now we have unprecedented monetary inflation in terms of base money, but almost no price inflation. - Price inflation is always a very non-linear function of its drivers. - Price inflation also doesn't have to be uniform. Some people would argue that the monetary measures taken after the financial crisis have already led to price inflation, namely price inflation of financial assets such as bonds and stocks. In this view, the money has been sloshing around the world as excess liquidity, being passed on like a hot potato that nobody wants to hold, propping up new bubbles but without leaving the financial system. - A simple quantity theory of money may not apply because we live in a complex credit based system. Base money is just a liability of the central bank. We don't pay and save much in base money, we pay and save mostly using liabilities of private banks. As long as the increases in base money don't trigger increases in these broader forms of money and credit (this is what it means when they say "the transmission mechanism has broken down" or "the velocity of money is too low"), we shouldn't normally expect any direct impact of base money increases on price inflation. About bitcoin: any healthy, advancing economy running mostly on actual bitcoins as a medium of exchange would probably see price deflation in terms of bitcoin. If we were to have technological progress like we had the last 50 years, the price deflation would probably be unprecedented. But if we could manage to piramid ever increasing amounts of credit on top of actual bitcoins and pay and save mostly in those credits, probably not so much :-)