What would have happened if the UK had not followed suit with monetary inflation over the past 5 or 6 years?
Would prudence have been rewarded, or would a Protestant adherence to the right course of action have been punished by falling exports and unemployment? In a global trading system, when one major player makes a mess of their money, must others do the same or be sorry?
Can the world be run on the principles of the efficient-market purists, or is there an advantage to the first to break ranks? Are monetarists doomed to merely understand what is going on, incapable of preventing it?
Showing posts with label monetarism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monetarism. Show all posts
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Inflation not purely a monetary phenomenon
I'm puzzled. Milton Friedman said, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," yet when I apply this to the UK it doesn't work.
I looked at the Bank of England's figures for M4 from end 1963 to end 2007, and by my calculation the monetary base has increased by a factor of about 240; yet prices have increased only 15 times in the same period. (*)
Currently (and time permitting) I'm also working through David Hackett Fischer's "The Great Wave". In his concluding chapter, he lists seven different causal explanations of inflation, and none of them quite fits the observed facts, not even monetarism. For example, in the sixteenth century, European prices began to rise some time before the imports of gold and silver from the New World could have made a difference.
His idea is that inflation-waves are "autogenous" (don't academics love this kind of label?), by which he means that people make decisions based on current circumstances and their personal predictions for the future, and that helps shape the next set of circumstances. It's like watching a football game unfold, each player adjusting his movements according to his perception of the others.
Fischer thinks that one important factor in the price-wave of the Middle Ages was a trend towards marrying earlier and having more children, which put pressure on natural resources at the same time as altering the ratio of working adults to dependant children. Perhaps this has modern echoes in the growing longevity and reducing mortality rate in the developing world, plus the increasing numbers of dependant elderly in most places.
At any rate, inflation in the West is likely to become less susceptible to control by adjusting the interest rate. What will the Monetary Policy Committee do then?
Perhaps it might help if we established some control over the actual amounts pumped into the economy by the banks (and other creditors). I can dimly remember the news in the 60s, about limits on how much you could borrow to buy fridges, washing machines etc - apparently a minimum deposit was a requirement of the Hire Purchase Act 1964.
However (it seems), Japanese manufacturers found ways to get round this and offer (in effect) 100% loans, and then came the pandemic of credit cards, starting with "your flexible friend" Access (1972). Telegram Sam the drug dealer is always friendly, at first.
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(*) Unless, of course, the discrepancy is accounted for by (a) the need for the monetary base to expand each year to cover interest on loans already made, and (b) much extra money being locked-up in real estate - an awful lot of building and rebuilding took place as the postwar economy recovered.
I looked at the Bank of England's figures for M4 from end 1963 to end 2007, and by my calculation the monetary base has increased by a factor of about 240; yet prices have increased only 15 times in the same period. (*)
Currently (and time permitting) I'm also working through David Hackett Fischer's "The Great Wave". In his concluding chapter, he lists seven different causal explanations of inflation, and none of them quite fits the observed facts, not even monetarism. For example, in the sixteenth century, European prices began to rise some time before the imports of gold and silver from the New World could have made a difference.
His idea is that inflation-waves are "autogenous" (don't academics love this kind of label?), by which he means that people make decisions based on current circumstances and their personal predictions for the future, and that helps shape the next set of circumstances. It's like watching a football game unfold, each player adjusting his movements according to his perception of the others.
Fischer thinks that one important factor in the price-wave of the Middle Ages was a trend towards marrying earlier and having more children, which put pressure on natural resources at the same time as altering the ratio of working adults to dependant children. Perhaps this has modern echoes in the growing longevity and reducing mortality rate in the developing world, plus the increasing numbers of dependant elderly in most places.
At any rate, inflation in the West is likely to become less susceptible to control by adjusting the interest rate. What will the Monetary Policy Committee do then?
Perhaps it might help if we established some control over the actual amounts pumped into the economy by the banks (and other creditors). I can dimly remember the news in the 60s, about limits on how much you could borrow to buy fridges, washing machines etc - apparently a minimum deposit was a requirement of the Hire Purchase Act 1964.
However (it seems), Japanese manufacturers found ways to get round this and offer (in effect) 100% loans, and then came the pandemic of credit cards, starting with "your flexible friend" Access (1972). Telegram Sam the drug dealer is always friendly, at first.
________________
(*) Unless, of course, the discrepancy is accounted for by (a) the need for the monetary base to expand each year to cover interest on loans already made, and (b) much extra money being locked-up in real estate - an awful lot of building and rebuilding took place as the postwar economy recovered.
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