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Originally Posted by alexamenos
mcsluggo -- discussions such as these remind me why I so prefer an nba fan forum to a politics (or economics) forum....pardon my extreme brevity...
the thing is, prices and wages don't move in unison. at best, wages lag the prices. an increase in the money supply doesn't effect everything at once, it affects somethings early and other things later and other things not at all. since no new goods or services are created by the act of putting new money into the economy, it's really a zero sum game -- the mere fact that some win means others lose and vice versa. bankers get their grubby little hands on the money first, so they profit by having new money to loan. little old ladies living on fixed pension don't benefit from the new money at all, in fact they lose because their fixed incomes buy less than before.
so the moral of the story is that if you favor a constantly expanding money supply you love greedy bankers and you hate little ole ladies.
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first, you need to look at the m1 numbers, they've been in a fairly tight band for the past dozen quarters or so. not really increasing nor decreasing.
yet we've had an underlying 2 to 3% rise in the marketbasket of goods we call the CPI.
the conclusion? inflation in prices is not solely tied to the money supply, and money supply by itself is not the cause of inflation.
those bankers with "grubby hands" don't like inflation at all, as it erodes their return on old loans and also are paid back in cheaper dollars.
wages may lag price increases, and it may lead price increases. the answer is what does the market anticipate? if the worker believes that there will be a healthy dose of inflation, they will seek wage increases to compensate, a situation where wages will lead prices and contribute to inflation.
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also...i wouldn't agree that price deflation is both recessionary and self-propagating -- declining prices may lead wage cuts but it certainly won't lead to a decrease in demand....people aren't going to demand less food just because the price of corn is dropping.
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no, the consumer will eat just like in the past, but they will delay discretionary purchases due to the expectation that whatever they are looking to buy will be cheaper tomorrow. deflation contributes to recession as business investment all but disappears.
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i've already gone much further than intended, so what the hell....i think a lot of (what shall we call it??), orthodox economic thought here the ole US is based upon a faulty premise that ever expanding consumerism is a good thing. so what if there is a five year period where people aren't buying more and more and more shit? we just can't picture any scenario in which people are generally content with their material status.
it's like we're a bunch of hamsters in a cage....we work our asses off so we can buy more shit, and we can't stop buying more shit because if we do we'll lose our high paying jobs which allow us to buy more shit. meanwhile, our wives are working their asses off too so that we can pay the interest on credit cards that we used to buy more shit, and rather than spend time with our kids we buy them a lot of shit and send them to shitty schools which are paid with our ever spiraling property taxes, thanks to rising property values.
and at the end of the day fucking citibank owns everything.
all i'm saying is that this what an ever expanding federally controlled money supply does for us. most generously, it enables some really shitty elements of human nature.
cheers
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did I just read that citi is laying off 8% of its workforce? so much for their owning everything...now if you want to talk about private equity owning everything, you might have a case.
there is some truth in the fragile nature of consumer consumption as the bedrock of our economic base.
however the philosophy that people seek a higher standard of living with their economic decisions is what capitalism is all about.
you should spend some time familiarizing yourself with japan and their problems with deflation, and the parellel problems with their lack of consumption. not a very pretty picture I can assure you....