inflation

Neither Govt Spending Nor Fed Printing Brought Higher Prices

Back in March of 2020, former Federal Reserve Board member Kevin Warsh penned an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal (“Let the Fed Administer an Antiviral Shot”) calling for the Federal Reserve to provide “liquidity” to American businesses crushed by lockdowns instituted by coronavirus-panicked politicians. Instead of recommending a cessation of the lockdowns […]

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A ‘Monetary Rule’ Doesn’t Suddenly Validate Mkt. Intervention

The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to adopt a “Monetary Policy Rule.” Not only would the central bank shed the pretense of rules-based constraints on its power during times of upheaval and uncertainty as is, there’s no good time for meddling by central banks, or for that matter any governmental entity. Market intervention is always

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Market Prices Are A Very Unreliable Way To Detect Inflation

If you look at the market prices of consumer goods you’ll much more often than not be blinded to inflation’s truth.  To which more than a few readers will reply that prices are precisely the way to divine inflation. Figure that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is “the price of a weighted average market

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The Inflation ‘Know-Somethings’ Doth Protest Too Much

“If one-half of the commodities in the market rise in exchange value, the very terms imply a fall of the other half; and reciprocally, the fall implies a rise.” – John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy There was a time – particularly among thinkers on the supply-side and supply-side adjacent right – when it was

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Inflation Is a Shrinkage of the Monetary Unit, Nothing Else

Inflation is all over the news and commentary today, particularly after a presidential election that was allegedly all about it. The problem remains that few who utter the word grasp its singular meaning. This includes Stanford professor Jennifer Burns, who not-so-ironically wrote a book about Milton Friedman. Friedman had his own problems with the

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Peter Orszag Discredits Keynes…AND Supply-Side on ‘Inflation’

Lazard chief executive Peter Orszag recently published an opinion piece in the Washington Post that exists as an essential economics lesson for left-leaning Keynesian economic thinkers, along with their erstwhile opposites on the supply-side right. Keynesian and supply-side have been in agreement in recent years that President Biden’s surely wasteful spending at the beginning

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Banks Wouldn’t Cause Inflation, Not Could They Ever Cause It

Whether it’s actual inflation, or the kind of “inflation” that only economists and their media enablers tend to imagine it to be, a consensus invariably emerges that the Federal Reserve must “raise interest rates” to rein in the lending that has allegedly caused inflation. Translated, price controls from the Federal Reserve to supposedly bring

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As Economists Do Now, Milton Friedman Got Inflation Wrong

In a video that’s gone viral, the late Milton Friedman correctly asserts about inflation that “consumers don’t produce it,” and “producers don’t produce it.” Only for Friedman to go off track with the observation that “too much government spending” does produce inflation. Ignored by Friedman was that governments aren’t some kind of other capable of extracting spending power from Pluto,

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