Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlp211 | Hacker News Reader

What inflation? Gold bugs have been telling me that inflation was going to happen for my entire 20 year adult life. And being on the Gold standard did not in any way prevent inflation...but don't let that little fact get in the way of your hard money talking points.

If you want to have an honest discussion about the inflationary effects of adding more dollars to the money supply, then we have to talk about where those dollars come from and why they do and don't create inflation. Talk about what the real demonstrable alternatives are, and whether or not a higher inflation is really the devil that so many claim it is.

View on HN

Where’s inflation? See real estate, all financial assets, medical costs, and education to name a few obvious examples. For many of the items actually included in CPI numbers, the inflation has been outsourced to third world countries.

The real demonstrable alternatives are those we had prior to eliminating the gold standard. We are now able to print our way out of recessions, at the cost of an incredibly destabilized economy comprised of asset valuations that are so high they lead to perfect correlation downward when there is a shock to confidence.

Real estate is local, my house in Alabama has returned sub 1% annualized in appreciation, my house in Washington as returned about 6% annualized. Where supply is constrained, prices are going up, where there is excess, prices aren't even keeping up with inflation. Seems like a perfectly rational market to me.

Financial assets is far too broad a category, but "markets can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent" isn't some new statement. I'd argue that this is more a consequence of a confluence of factors including the end of general scarcity of capital, low interest rates, and low taxes.

Medical and Education costs are structural issues within the US, see most of Europe for a counter example.

As far as outsourcing, well that has lifted over 1 billion people out of poverty...so yea, I got nothing for you if you think American's being able to buy more goods for fewer dollars while simultaneously making the world a better place is something to be concerned about.

And our economy is far more stable today then any time in the history of the US. Or are we going to pretend that multiple depressions didn't happen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The only reason that the 2008 recession was as bad as it was, was because of a lack of political will to spend money.

Inflation hasn't become a reality since the other nations still trust the value of the US dollars as reserve. With so high trade deficits, we are essentially saying to the world, "sell me goods in exchange for the paper that I printed some big numbers on it", without getting as much in return.

Do you think this is sustainable in the long run? Will they keep giving us more goods/services than they get? What would happen if they decide to not use US dollar as reserve or they start demanding another currency for trade?

If the US dollar ceases to be the world's de facto currency, we have much larger problems then the moderate inflation that may or may not follow. I'd argue it is far more a political problem than a monetary problem at that point.

And FED continuing to print excess money is one of the reasons believed to speed up the process to the "much larger problems".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com