Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

—“The Fed can do whatever it wants. It literally has a football field full of printing presses in the basement. If they want to re-steepen the yield curve, they can do it tomorrow. They just don’t want to change the paradigm. Don’t want to rock the boat. Change will creep in at the margin, probably among the scandis and Japanese, who has been dealing with these problems the longest.”— Michael Churchill

Michael is saying the same thing everyone says, and thats that the state can’t go bankrupt because debt is denominated in dollars that they can print and simultaneously inflate.

That’s different from deflation, in which people simply refuse to spend no matter what, or hyperinflation, which means that people are so suspicious of the future value that contracts for complex production are impossible, and demand for cash increases rapidly and the unpredictability appears in temporary (daily, hourly) prices. Money must allow the organization of networks of intertemporal investment, production, distribution, and trade, without providing rents (allowing interest-only gains), or decreasing the tolerance for time differences.

In other words, the longer and more complex the Hayekian triangles (networks of production) the more the need for a stable currency. This is why states prefer spending rather than direct inflation. On the other hand I recommend direct distribution rather than inflation or spending, because this is the most direct route to the population and the people tend to spend rather than pay down debts.

NOTE: notice I how just talked about economics operationally in descriptive terms (actions) using only Hayekian Triangles, and even when I did, I only did so to teach you the term. conversely note how people use many terms of art in economics. The problem is the individual does not know the difference between an economic term and a financial term. Inflation of the money supply causes inflation of prices to absorb it, such that the purchasing power of TIME (time and other resources are still just time, time to get the resources), stays the same. Deflation generally means decline in prices due to decreasing demand, and both deflation and inflation (increases because of more money, deflation because of less spending, or shift in what’s being produced. Right now restaurant food prices are increasing because more people have jobs and restaurants are having to pay more for staff.)