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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

Quantitative easing doesn't generally cause inflation in my opinion. All it does is increases bank reserves which is why 10 years into endless qe, inflation is very muted.

The reason they are finally expecting inflation now is that they are going into policy measures on the fiscal side that actually enter the real economy, not just qe. Imo one dollar of fiscal expenditure has the power of at least $10 of qe if not actually more like an infinite multiplier in the case that qe does literally nothing.

If you are interested I. This kind of stuff search YouTube for Jeff snider or Lacy Hunt. Both of them are really fascinating to listen to and have a strong conviction that qe is totally ineffective.

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Economies don't exist in a vacuum. There is a demand component and a supply component. The Fed pretends as if influencing the supply component is the only thing that is important.

There are parallels to the law of the minimum.

>It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). [0]

The same applies to the economy. If adding more money to the supply side does nothing, that means you already did your job and the supply side is already saturated and you should look for the part of the economy that is lacking in stimulus.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum

Can you think of any period of hyper-inflation without quantitative easing? People assume that because the velocity doesn't increase in lock step with the amount of currency creation that somehow inflation has been avoided, but the tsunami is still coming.

A series of growing incidents will become a crisis, and it will lead to a collapse in faith of the spending power of all western fiat currencies. That's when everyone, including large institutions will start disgorging vast amounts of dollars in an effort to put that value somewhere more secure and the spending power of the currency will collapse and with it the value of everyone's savings.

There is nothing new here. This has happened many times before.

Sure. As far as I'm aware of not a single historical episode of hyperinflation ever had anything to do with QE.

QE is central bank asset purchases, not attached to specific policy or spending, extending into the long end of the yield curve, of a pre determined quantity, at least pre determined per time period.

The first people to do this were the Japanese in the mid 90s. So every hyper inflation event before that was not caused by QE. The ones after it as well. Venezuela and Zimbabwe weren't trying to influence the yield curve when they hyper inflated, they were printing money directly to pay debt and buy commodities.

Despite the fact that QE increases the money supply, it is not synonymous with literally printing money

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