What the heck is inflation?
What the heck is inflation?
Episode IV. Block height: 768200. Inflation is talked about a lot, but it is not what you might think it is. Brrrring it on.
Week 50, Bitcoin and Macroeconomics summarized:
FTX: Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of failed crypto exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas last Monday after US prosecutors filed criminal charges against him.
Twitter: Elon Musk launched a poll on Twitter asking whether he should step down as its CEO. The majority voted against Elon Musk as CEO, thereupon Edward Snowden said that he was ready to become the new CEO of Twitter if paid in Bitcoin.
Inflation: The annual consumer price level in the US officially ‘slowed’ to 7.1% in November, down from 7.7% in October and the smallest 12-month increase since December 2021. Calm before the storm.
Gold: Goldman Sachs, one of the largest U.S. banks by assets under management, believes that gold will outshine Bitcoin in the long term since it is a superior portfolio diversifier. Time to buy some more corn.
BIS: Bank of international settlement (The bank of central banks) now allows retail banks to hold 2% of reserves in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin On-Chain: The most Bitcoin ever has left exchanges:
In this episode, we discuss inflation, well more specific the impact of monetary expansion on the general price level because there is a lot of confusion on this subject. I try to create clarity in this episode. So let’s dive in.
Unfortunately, a lot of terms are mixed up in the current debate about rising prices and inflation. This is bad, because linguistic desensitization prevents us from recognizing cause and effect and subsequently makes it difficult to solve the causal problem.
Instead, inadequate measures such as price controls and nationalization are often called for to combat the wave of price increases, while inflation continues to be stoked in the background. In particular, it is crucial to distinguish between inflation and price increases, which are unfortunately considered synonymous in today's discussion.
Inflation
Inflation (Latin: „īn-flāre“; inflate, swell) is an increase in the quantity of money and credit. Full stop.
First and foremost: The general term inflation is NOT defined as rising prices, like the media and central banks propagate. Moreover, for them, inflation is primary the rising prices of things people buy day by day, which they call Consumer Price ‘Inflation’ (CPI). But, as we will see, inflation is and has always been the expansion of the money supply, nothing more than the voluntary act of central banks to increase the amount of money in an economy.
Common jargon confuses the effect for the cause. Expanding the money quantity is inflation, the rising price level (commonly called ‘price inflation’), is in reality a devaluation of the currency and the effect of monetary expansion over a longer period of time. Thus, the bottom line is:
Rising prices therefore do not equal inflation, although inflation in the classical sense can have a major impact on “prices”, as we will see.
But first, it is very important to distinguish between increasing prices of some things, which is usually referred to as Consumer Price ‘Inflation’ (CPI), and the increase of the general price level of all things as an aggregate.
Consumer Price ‘Inflation’
A widely used price index is the CPI, an index which tries to reflect changes in the prices of goods and services typically purchased by consumers. When the media reports on the rate of inflation, it usually cites a figure calculated using the CPI. This flawed concept aggregates fundamentally different goods and services, adding them up and then calculating an "average price" from it.
On the one hand, this measure does not take into account changes in the quality of goods and services. On the other hand, the government can have a great influence on the basket of goods and services used for the calculation by determining which products and services are inside the basket. In this process, higher quality products are regularly exchanged for lower quality products, thus manipulating the CPI rate significantly over time.
The General Price Level
For this reason, we “Austrians” look at prices as an aggregate which is mathematically determined by the total amount of money that is available for spending in a given period of time (Money Quantity x Money Velocity), in relation to the total supply of all real values which are available for purchase with money in that period of time. The law of determining an aggregate price level is the following:
This means, that the aggregate price level moves in direct proportion to the quantity and the velocity (the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase goods and services within a given time period) of money. It moves in inverse proportion to the aggregate supply of all real values.
If the money supply increases by let’s say 30% (2020–2022), while the supply of values and velocity of money remain constant, the general price level tents to rise in the direction of +30%. Of course, this is a strong simplification, because either velocity could go down or the supply of all real values could go up, and thus having a dampening or reinforcing effect on the general price level.
However, this does not change the fact that the direction of the general price level is determined by the underlying money supply. The original increase of the money supply, often temporarily masked by a reduction of money velocity, was what set the equilibrium level of prices higher than their actual level and thus created the inflationary bias. The difference between the actual price level and the higher equilibrium price level is the unrealized depreciation of a currency, and the living process of working upward from the lower to the higher is inflation.
The direction of the equilibrium level and the breadth of the gap indicates which way prices must move and how far at a maximum, but not necessarily when or how fast. Therefore, it is the underlying money demand available which dictates to buyers and sellers the way their prices must go and where they must arrive, leaving it to them to decide when and at what speed they will accompany one another to that point.
Nonetheless, the root of the price increase is and remains the original monetary expansion: You can’t just increase the money supply many times over and assume that there would be no consequences. Why should money not be subject to the laws of supply and demand? An increasing supply with simultaneously unchanged or falling demand leads to falling purchasing power. Therefore, one thing is clear to representatives of the Austrian School of Economics:
The more monetary units in circulation,
the lower their quality is perceived to be.
Let’s summarize it: First, the money supply increases, money velocity falls behind, and prices remain steady. Later, money velocity recovers, prices begin to rise, and equilibrium eventually returns to the level fixed by the original money supply expansion. Therefore, the money expansion is the cause, rising prices the effect and not vice versa.
That's it for this episode. To dive deeper into the topic, I've linked you to a few very helpful books below. Check them out! Thanks for reading this episode. Feedback is always highly appreciated.
I see you hopefully in the next one. Until then, remember: Education matters. ₿ critical, ₿ informed, ₿ prepared.
More on this topic
[1] Carl Menger, The Origins of Money.
[2] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
[3] G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
[4] Jens O. Parsson, Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflation
[5] Robert L. Schuettinger, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation
[6] Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-Inflation
[7] Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
Excellent explainer. Thanks!
Fantastic article Carl. May I request a follow up article? The effect of fiscal policy appears to have (in part) increased highstreet goods prices by function of subsidising demand. Whereas aggressive monetary policy hasn't really driven up prices above GDP since it began 15 years ago.