The problem isn’t some inflation or deflation. It’s having constantly positive inflation, the levers for which are pulled by insiders. At best they’re trying to prevent all forest fires, and the dry brush keeps accumulating until we get a fire too big to put out. At worst they’re just picking whichever interest rates they’ve been bribed to pick.
Corporate profits keep going up, CEO pay keeps going up, inequality keeps going up, but real income has not kept up at all. We aren’t the beneficiaries of inflationary monetary policy. It’s functional wealth extraction, not incompetent management.
This isn’t what Keynes wanted at all. He expected the inflation money would go towards public works and we’d have a 15-hour work week, not funding bond holders and a gradually increasing work week. We adopted half of his rationale as a post hoc rationalization for the Nixon Shock.
The problem isn’t some inflation or deflation. It’s having constantly positive inflation, the levers for which are pulled by insiders. At best they’re trying to prevent all forest fires, and the dry brush keeps accumulating until we get a fire too big to put out. At worst they’re just picking whichever interest rates they’ve been bribed to pick.
Corporate profits keep going up, CEO pay keeps going up, inequality keeps going up, but real income has not kept up at all. We aren’t the beneficiaries of inflationary monetary policy. It’s functional wealth extraction, not incompetent management.
This isn’t what Keynes wanted at all. He expected the inflation money would go towards public works and we’d have a 15-hour work week, not funding bond holders and a gradually increasing work week. We adopted half of his rationale as a post hoc rationalization for the Nixon Shock.