 |
| (Source) |
Monetarism (for our purposes, at least) can be summed up by Milton Friedman's famous dictum,
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
This is undoubtedly true, but it is frequently misinterpreted by many commentators. Especially on my side of the aisle, it is often claimed that the "Fed" is just "printing money" as fast as it can--one helicopter drop after the other. In fact, the Federal Reserve Bank can't print money--all it can do is add money to bank reserves. Those may eventually leak out into the economy, but such leakage depends not on the Fed, but on the economy's demand for money.
While the Fed can't print money, the Treasury certainly can. The former is supposed to be politically independent (and to some extent it surely is) and is responsible for so-called monetary policy. The latter--responsible for fiscal policy--is very much beholden to the president and Congress (i.e., inherently political), and isn't allowed to spend anything without legislative authorization. Given that authorization, it can effectively print money.
As Mr. Friedman's suggests, inflation doesn't just depend on how much money is being created (or "printed," if you prefer that term), but also on how much money is needed by the economy. That is, if the supply of money ("printing") is balanced by the demand for money, then there will be no inflation (or deflation). Conversely, if the supply of money exceeds the demand, or the demand for money is less than the supply, then there will be inflation. (The reverse will lead to deflation.)
And this is where I think Mr. Roberts makes his most fundamental mistake: he confuses the supply of money with the supply of goods and services. He writes (link in original),
And in a recent post, I recounted a long study by Joseph Stiglitz that offered comprehensive data showing that inflation was caused by supply-side shortages not ‘excessive demand.
Since then, more evidence has appeared backing up the supply story. One recent paper found that when the economy came out of the COVID pandemic lockdowns and slump there was a shift into buying more goods. However, producers were unable to deal with this surge.
In the linked post, he compares the "supply story" with the demand story (here referring to the supply and demand of goods and services, not money). In the former, it's because of pandemic-driven snafus in the supply chain that caused price rises, and hence inflation. A variant of the "supply story" is the so-called wage-price spiral. In this case it is the labor supply that's causing the snafu, and the economy responds by raising prices.
Contrary to the supply story, it could be higher demand that's causing inflation. People want to buy more stuff, the stuff is not being produced at sufficient volume, the price of stuff goes up, so people empty out their bank accounts to buy the stuff anyway, even at the inflated prices. That is, inflation is caused because demand has outstripped supply.
Mr. Roberts does not subscribe to the demand story--he believes that it's supply snafus that have caused inflation. The solution, therefore, is not to curtail demand (e.g., by raising interest rates), but instead to augment supply. In Mr. Stiglitz's opinion this is to be done by more regulation of the market.
I think both analyses are wrong. There is no question but that the pandemic made us poorer. It reduced the supply of a large number of goods and services--driving many businesses out of business altogether. Governments around the world made (in varying degrees) many things illegal, e.g., eating in restaurants, riding on airplanes or cruise ships, working in an office or factory, sending your children to school, etc. Increased poverty was the order of the day.
But poverty does not cause inflation--nor does inflation automatically cause poverty. Inflation is caused by variations in the money supply. Misters Roberts and Stiglitz err in conflating the money supply with supply and demand in the goods economy. They are not the same thing. And we're back at Mr. Friedman's dictum--inflation results when the supply of money (not goods) exceeds the demand for money (not goods).
The Fed purports to moderate the money supply by using two tools: 1) open market transactions to keep overnight interest rates within a certain range; and 2) varying the size of total bank reserves by various tricks including quantitative easing (QE), etc. These are very blunt instruments, and they've gotten blunter with time. The link between overnight interest rates (that the Fed controls) and longer term interest rates (such as your home mortgage) looks to have broken down. The effectiveness of the other tools is dubious at best.
More, there are too many other players in the monetary game besides the Fed. There's the whole shadow banking network (including money market funds) that exists outside of the Fed's direct reach. And then the Eurodollar market (dollars housed outside the US, uncontrolled by the Fed) is huge and clearly has an impact on the domestic money supply. So the Fed is, in significant measure, a paper tiger.
However little control the Fed has over the money supply, it does regulate and backstop the banking system (see Bagehot's Rule). This job is as important as ever, especially right now.
But even if the Fed can't control the money supply, it is still possible for the Treasury to "print" money. So they don't actually print it, but instead they borrow it. Through its QE programs the Fed dramatically increased the levels of bank reserves. This allows the banks to lend way more money if there is a market for the loans. There was a huge market--between Trump and Biden, the government borrowed $3 trillion for so-called "Covid relief." This had absolutely no effect on the supply of goods--not a single supply snafu was straightened out as a result. But it had a huge impact on the money supply.
Mr. Roberts seems to think this had no effect on inflation. He writes,
...that increased money supply is associated with rising house prices and stock prices – no mention of the prices of goods and services. And that is the point. Strong money supply growth and low interest rates up to the point of the pandemic did not lead to rising prices and accelerating inflation in the shops. Instead, money supply fuelled a credit boom expressed in a boom in real estate and financial assets.
He's right, of course. The immediate effect of the Covid Relief windfall was to increase savings--after all, with pandemic restrictions there were no easy ways to spend the money. So it went into the stock market, high-end real estate, bitcoin and other crypto assets, and collectables. Mr. Roberts doesn't count this as "inflation" because it's not measured by the CPI. But it surely is a way to store money for later use.
And later arrived with the end of the pandemic rules. All that money was pulled out of storage and poured into the goods and services economy. Accordingly, asset prices tumbled, but inflation in goods and services soared--and we're confronted with the inflation problem we have today. Like all inflation, it's caused by too much money chasing too few goods--and it has nothing to do with a wage-price spiral or a supply snafu or some such.
What to do about it? The Fed will have to raise interest rates and engage in quantitative tightening to soak back up the extra cash. But it won't work very well--it is obviously breaking the banking system before it's ending inflation. So I'm not optimistic that inflation will go down anytime soon.
The bottom line is inflation is a function of government deficit spending. When the government spends money faster than the economy is growing, inflation will ensue. Only when the government cuts the deficit will inflation slow down. Cutting the deficit means cutting social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the defense budget. This is politically and socially impossible.
Have a nice day.
Further Reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment