It used to be broadly understood that inflation was currency devaluation, not a politicized concept that warring ideologies could redefine on the fly. They’ve done exactly this in recent years by making inflation whatever they want it to be, including an effect of lockdowns, deficits, the impossibility that is “easy money,” and on and on.
Supply Siders Close To Trump Need To Fix His Dollar Confusion Read More »
Former budget director Mick Mulvaney is the latest, but surely not the last to say that inflation is “too much money chasing too few goods.”
No, Inflation Is Not ‘Too Much Money Chasing Too Few Goods’ Read More »
Fed watchers and economists write about and watch the Fed with breathy intensity. Can it bring prices down? No, it can’t.
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Gold sits at all-time highs in dollars. What that signals is that the dollar’s value against the constant that is gold is at all-time lows.
Gold Is Speaking Very Loudly Now, Is Anyone Listening? Read More »
Inflation is a policy choice of governments that long predates central banks that the various economic religions have oddly happened on as the creator and fix for inflation.
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For Bill Ackman to suggest that rising energy costs could “cause inflation to rise” is for the investor to flip causation. It’s the equivalent of the assertion that suntans cause the sun.
Quite Unlike His Investing Style, Bill Ackman’s Economics Scream Conventional Read More »
As always, rising prices can’t cause inflation any more than falling prices can cause deflation. Both are currency phenomena born of currency instability either in the direction of weakness or strength.
Christopher Waller’s Inflation ‘Prescience’ Didn’t Much Exceed Lawrence Summers’s Read More »
Critics of so-called “isolationism” claim a desire to stay out of conflicts like Ukraine are rooted in veneration for Donald Trump and/or Tucker Carlson, partisan disdain for Joe Biden, fear that the U.S. is too weak for global involvement, too broke, or that non-interventionists want to save money, bombs and bullets for the supposedly inevitable war with China over Taiwan.
Critics of ‘Isolationism’ Cherry-Pick the Worst Arguments For It Read More »
At the Wall Street Journal, Fed-watcher Timiraos writes that with government measures of inflation having “fallen much faster than expected,” nominal interest rates “adjusted for inflation” have “risen and might be restricting economic activity too much.” He worries that the nothing of notion of “rising real rates” signals great peril for the U.S. economy, and the Fed that allegedly plans it. The good news is that rates aren’t uniform because people aren’t.
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Bruce Springsteen’s mother scrimped and saved to get him his first electric guitar. Which hardly makes him unique. His story is like most for the musicians of his era.
Bruce Springsteen’s Mother ‘Scrimped’ To Get Him His First Guitar Read More »
