The Non-Mystery of Inflation
posted by Josiah Garber on January 16, 2010
in Economics
by Mark Spangler on Mises Daily
[The Freeman, 1978]
Nowadays people from every walk of life are concerned about inflation.
What actually is inflation? Is it inherent in a free market economy? Who or what is the cause? Unions, government regulations, merchants, federal deficits, or middlemen? Can inflation be stopped, and how?
What to do? Most people are desperately confused and searching for answers. Society is facing nothing short of a crisis. In answer to this grave situation comes Henry Hazlitt’s latest book, The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It. As Mr. Hazlitt himself begins the book, “no subject is so much discussed today — or so little understood — as inflation.”
Henry Hazlitt estimates that a dollar of today is worth less than 25 cents of a 1940 dollar, and certainly no one has to be told that a dollar continues to buy less and less. Yet, how many people realize that since 1940 the federal government has increased the money stock by well over a thousand percent? Hazlitt reports that at the end of 1939 the total number of dollars in the economy was 63.3 billion, and at the end of 1977 that figure stood at 806.5 billion. Anyone who is aware of these events should surely sense a logical connection between constantly rising prices and a continuous expansion of the money supply.
Mr. Hazlitt points out that there are two sides to every price.
A price is an exchange ratio between a dollar and a unit of goods. When people have more dollars, they value each dollar less. Goods then rise in price, not because goods are scarcer than before, but because dollars are more abundant, and thus less valued.
He clearly explains that the present predicament of ever-soaring prices results from a deliberate government policy to flood the economy with more and more dollars simply by “printing” them. In fact, the term inflation originally meant increasing (inflating) the money supply. Today the term is commonly used to mean the most evident consequence of creating money, generally rising prices.
So, nothing at all is mysterious about inflation; it is government intervention pure and simple. Why, then, do government leaders continue to inflate and why do the printing presses go undetected by the general public?
There Will Be (Hyper)Inflation
posted by Josiah Garber on April 7, 2009
in Economics, Politics
by Thorstein Polleit
Increasing “Excess Reserves”
The demise of fiat-money regimes around the world has become unmistakable. They can only be kept alive by central banks creating ever greater amounts of base money and governments underwriting commercial banks’ liabilities.
The US Federal Reserve, for instance, increased the stock of the monetary base — which includes banks’ demand deposits held with the Fed, plus coins and notes in circulation — from $870.9 billion in August 2008 to $1735.3 billion in January 2009.
An Inflationary Depression? Perhaps…
posted by Josiah Garber on March 23, 2009
in Economics, Politics
And if you don’t think the government has been interfering much, take a look at this.