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Absolutely. If you don't understand the mechanisms that create inflation and are still clinging to long discredited worries about the "money supply", then I'll

by rsj_hn 6y ago

Absolutely. If you don't understand the mechanisms that create inflation and are still clinging to long discredited worries about the "money supply", then I'll bet against any opinion of yours on inflation. I'll win that bet much more often than not.

rsj_hn 6y ago
I realized some more information would be needed for people genuinely curious about the relationships between monetary aggregates and inflation. A good summary is this essay, by the Federal Reserve: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12845.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12845.htm Basically, in the beggining the Fed was charged with keeping the money supply from growing too quickly, but it found that 1) it was unable to control the size of the monetary aggregates because these are determined by the lending, repayment, and asset allocations of the private sector. All the central bank could do is encourage various allocations by adjusting the interest rate. For example when rates are low, there is not much point in keeping your money in bonds or savings accounts, so a greater proportion is kept in demand accounts as the extra flexibility outweighs the pittance in interest you'll earn. 2) the size of the money supply didn't have much to do with inflation anyway. By the 90s, they stopped trying to do this and they even stopped tracking some of the aggregates, as they were just irrelevant to managing inflation. Inflation is managed by interest rates and the money supply is endogenous, created or destroyed by the financial sector in response to consumer tastes so all the federal government can do is try to incentivize those tastes by adjusting interest rates. If people want to keep their money in bonds, they shift their assets to reduce deposit claims and increase bond claims. The result of this asset re-allocation is that any excess is pushed back onto the financial system and sits idle as excess reserves in banks, not creating any inflation, not "chasing goods", or causing any trouble for anyone except a small number of people who read the statistics about excess reserves and start worrying that the excess reserves will make a run for it, break out of the banks, and start bidding up the prices of goods and services. I can understand why a reporter would have this view, but really we should see things a bit more clearly. People spend more when their wages go up so they can afford to buy more, or when interest rates fall to encourage them to borrow to buy durable goods because the financing costs are cheaper. They don't spend more as a result of whether Citibank has 1 trillion or 4 trillion in excess reserves. That is completely irrelevant to anyone's spending decision, to any firm's investment or production plans, and thus to inflation.

by rsj_hn 6y ago

rsj_hn 6y ago

I realized some more information would be needed for people genuinely curious about the relationships between monetary aggregates and inflation. A good summary is this essay, by the Federal Reserve: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12845.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12845.htm Basically, in the beggining the Fed was charged with keeping the money supply from growing too quickly, but it found that 1) it was unable to control the size of the monetary aggregates because these are determined by the lending, repayment, and asset allocations of the private sector. All the central bank could do is encourage various allocations by adjusting the interest rate. For example when rates are low, there is not much point in keeping your money in bonds or savings accounts, so a greater proportion is kept in demand accounts as the extra flexibility outweighs the pittance in interest you'll earn. 2) the size of the money supply didn't have much to do with inflation anyway. By the 90s, they stopped trying to do this and they even stopped tracking some of the aggregates, as they were just irrelevant to managing inflation. Inflation is managed by interest rates and the money supply is endogenous, created or destroyed by the financial sector in response to consumer tastes so all the federal government can do is try to incentivize those tastes by adjusting interest rates. If people want to keep their money in bonds, they shift their assets to reduce deposit claims and increase bond claims. The result of this asset re-allocation is that any excess is pushed back onto the financial system and sits idle as excess reserves in banks, not creating any inflation, not "chasing goods", or causing any trouble for anyone except a small number of people who read the statistics about excess reserves and start worrying that the excess reserves will make a run for it, break out of the banks, and start bidding up the prices of goods and services. I can understand why a reporter would have this view, but really we should see things a bit more clearly. People spend more when their wages go up so they can afford to buy more, or when interest rates fall to encourage them to borrow to buy durable goods because the financing costs are cheaper. They don't spend more as a result of whether Citibank has 1 trillion or 4 trillion in excess reserves. That is completely irrelevant to anyone's spending decision, to any firm's investment or production plans, and thus to inflation.