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Author Topic: Armchair Economics Thread - Re-Resurrection  (Read 24011 times)

McTraveller

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Re: Armchair Economics Thread - Re-Resurrection
« Reply #390 on: Today at 11:41:13 am »

It's not that hard to understand really.

High employment growth rate and low unemployment is a wage growth pressure, which can sustain inflation: if you give people more money to spend, without increasing production, then prices are likely to increase (or stay high, if they are already high).

Cheap debt is also a pressure for increasing inflation, because if there is more money flowing around, then, again, without an increase in production then prices will increase (all else equal).

The difficulty the Fed faces is that even wages can be debt-financed.  This means that increasing the cost of borrowing can reduce demand for labor. So the Fed is stuck with a lever that helps achieve one mandate while simultaneously making it more difficult to achieve the other.

As for Wall Street and interest rates, it's more straightforward because there are fewer competing effects: lower interest rates mean both cheaper capital for companies and increased demand for their goods/services, because it's cheaper for customers to finance buying whatever it is that company makes. So this helps companies both on the top and bottom lines: lower costs, higher sales.

What you really want as a lever to help with inflation, but not as adversely impact inflation, is a way to increase supply of goods so that you have "enough goods chasing the money" instead of "too few goods chasing too much money".

This can't easily be done with just financial tools though. Part of the difficulty is that in a physical universe, it's not always easy to just increase production, or some unexpected event disrupts production, or some event causes a massive demand spike (e.g., some popular person says to go buy This Brand thing, so demand suddenly spikes), etc.  Because companies (and all of society, generally) is incentivized to operate with as little spare capacity as possible (because that's lost profits, yo!), any disruption easily limits supply.

One easily-comprehended option would be to have strategic reserves not just of a few commodities but as many commodities as possible. Why not a strategic milk reserve, or egg reserve, or tennis shoe reserve, etc.  If you have a store of goods, then it's easy to see that this smooths out any sudden supply (or demand!) changes.  With modern just-in-time systems, the buffer is essentially nonexistent, which can often lead to instabilities.  At the very least the US tax code could change so it doesn't penalize companies from holding inventory like it does today.

That's just the basic economic / controls system theory though - it doesn't even get into the political aspects (which I want to avoid in this thread) where some institutions want there to be instability.
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