Deflation isn't necessarily a problem; but runaway deflation is, and the structure of bitcoin makes deflation a self-perpetuating cycle.
Which is what exactly? People buy electronics even though they get cheaper every year but they wouldn't buy Xs if they got cheaper every year? Can you give me an example of some Xs?
If everything got cheaper every year, then people with money in the bank (or under the mattress) have an incentive to reduce how much money they spend, in general. This would lead to factories reducing their production and laying off employees, giving the remaining employees an even more powerful incentive to hang onto their savings.
Trade imbalances resulting from an economy run on bitcoins would also decimate most domestic production, so sethg's statement is doubly true. It's the same reason you hear members of congress railing against China's currency peg that artificially deflates the yuan; it makes Chinese exports cheaper to the rest of the world.
In that case its value should get higher and exports should decrease, as happened with the Japanese Yen.
The mechanism that the Chinese government uses to keep the Yuan pegged to the USD, is the purchase of U.S. treasuries[2].
Here is some additional info:
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/65773.pdf
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/on-chinas-currency-pe...
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system#Mech...[2] http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js...
It also helps that constant development and improvements keeps the decline in pricing small. An iPod today, while much more impressive, I believe still has a similar price to 10 years ago.
Some things can't really get cheaper every year (without some exogenous shock) -- anything with really high fixed costs of production OR a requirement of some level of quality by purchasers.
For example, it takes a ton of land to grow corn. As the population grows, the demand for and value of land will rise. That means that for the farmer to keep growing corn on his land, instead of selling it or using it in a new profitable venture, the corn needs to be producing a higher level of income for him than it had previously when land was cheaper.
Similarly - grass fed beef is not going to get cheaper. In addition to land requirements, there is the quality requirement also. If someone demands higher quality food, higher standards need to be followed, higher quality inputs need to be used, and a third party needs to ensure that those requirements are being followed.
If it's for work and there's some measurable benefit to the latest and greatest (rather than just showing off), that's different. But as a matter of habit, I only build a new PC once every 3 years; for about the same amount of cash, I get a roughly 400% speed boost.
(The opposite of this scenario is housing inflation, and causes people to buy houses sooner and for more money than they would ex-inflation. This makes some sense if the inflation continues as buyers expected.)
This scenario is different from single goods getting cheaper every year in that when the prices of all goods are going down, it's very clear that the value of money is also going down. Deflation slows spending primarily via expectation of future deflation, so across-the-board price declines will have more impact transmitting deflation expectations than mixed signals (electronics down, oil up).
But, the reason that's not exactly a fair comparison is that the currency itself (in this case, USD) was not deflating. Ergo, my "hoarding" was actually putting it into something with a better return for the time being, which was available because the currency was stable. If the best return I could get was holding on to my money (instead of putting it in some sort of investment vehicle), then that would be deflation.
But you could have kept waiting and prices would have kept falling. Eventually you spent your money anyway. This seems to indicate that it wasn't the situation of falling prices that prevented you from buying a TV, since that never changed, but some external factor.
"But, the reason that's not exactly a fair comparison is that the currency itself (in this case, USD) was not deflating. Ergo, my "hoarding" was actually putting it into something with a better return for the time being, which was available because the currency was stable. If the best return I could get was holding on to my money (instead of putting it in some sort of investment vehicle), then that would be deflation."
The currency was deflating relative to TVs. Holding cash does provide a better return than holding a TV. The value of a TV depreciates much faster than cash. That's the point--why would anyone ever buy a TV when if they just held onto their money for a month they could always get a better TV for the same amount? Since TV prices are always falling, this question reduces to: why would anyone ever buy a TV? The answer is pretty simple--people want TVs. At some point if they want one, they're just going to buy one regardless of what the prices are doing, just like you did. So where's the problem?
In countries that have hyperinflation, you see extreme cases of this: middle-class consumers spend their paychecks as soon as the money is deposited, because they’d rather have anything on hand than cash in the bank.
Prices don't fall linearly, in many cases, but hit a floor representing the cost of manufacturing and distribution. Then, different brands have different price decay curves. Finally, the price decay of a given good has to be offset against the buyer's utility function. In practice, I don't sit there and calculate everything out; I start with a budget and a list of manufacturers I prefer, and then look for the best products that fit within those constraints.
It is however pretty easy to see why inflation is good for people in power, in particular governments; it's a hidden tax. And yes it does encourage people to spend, in fact it encourages people to borrow and then spend. Even borrow so much that it crashes the system.
So as far as I'm concerned the fixed money supply is about the only good property of Bitcoin. Other than that it's a ponzi scheme and it's a lot more cumbersome than electronically traded gold.
Unsustainable debt is an orthogonal issue. We've encouraged unsustainable debt not by allowing our currency to inflate, but by failing to regulate lenders and by offering them incentives to ignore risk management.
Again, though: this "is a little inflation good, and is a little deflation bad?" thing is a fake controversy that dignifies Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't a currency; it's a gambling game powered by a distributed transaction system that may or may not on any day function well enough for two parties to exchange dollars for off-label hosting services without either one losing their shirt.
If you look at people's behavior with a commodity like gasoline, you'll see similar behavior. When prices go up, people will "top off" their cars more frequently. When prices are falling, people tend to go further between fill-ups.
So how much would computers have to fall in price every year before people stopped buying them?
When Nehalem processors came out, the economics shifted, and there was a financial case for retiring devices at 24-36 months and consolidating them into virtual machine clusters.
Without that consolidation opportunity, we probably would have extended the lifecycle of our server longer to preserve cash in 2009.
It can cause hoarding. It's not a given. But it can get into a downward spiral.
Does this cause people to hold onto their money instead of buying computers, tvs, and iphones? Of course not.
Are you sure? No one would argue that all people would stop buying all consumer electronics, the question is: what would sales be like with stable prices? I don't know how to answer it but I don't know how you can say for sure that sales are not lower than they would be with stable prices. Or rather, I am sure it is possible to construct models to try to understand the relation but I am doubtful that you have done so or have a particular model in mind. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The difference with a stable currency supply is savers and fixed income earners wouldn't have their purchasing power sucked away from them year after year--on the contrary, they'd become continually wealthier as the economy grows around them.
Generally inflation is priced into interest rates. If you look at countries with much higher inflation they tend to have much higher basic interest rates.
Krugman's arguments in the post are pretty brief, he's just stating his opinion and not conducting a thorough examination. Likewise, I don't find your arguments very persuasive but that doesn't mean that you are wrong and he is right.
What about "investors" instead of "consumers"? Right now an investor simply makes a choice between losing money by sitting on it (through increased supply ... printing money leads to inflation) or investing. If the money supply were fixed would that not make it more attractive to investors to sit on assets?
If you are on top, you wouldn't want to make extra effort to stay there!
The point of an economy is not to spend money, it's to create more wealth for more people by allocating resources efficiently. If someone "hoards" money, and prices are stable, that person is effectively staying out of the resource-allocation business. It doesn't mean that there are fewer resources to allocate, it just means that other people are doing the allocating (even though those people collectively have less money because of "hoarders", prices are lower because of them, too).
You can make an argument that everyone needs to take part in efficiently allocating resources, and that makes a lot of sense. But to say that buying a bunch of consumer junk is a good way to do that is ridiculous (and bad for the environment).
A middle ground is to buy the things you need, a few things you want, and make conservative investments. That allows most individuals to mostly stay out of the resource allocation business, but still enjoy the benefits.
Currently, you can invest your money elsewhere at the opportunity cost of foregoing the utility of whatever gadget it is that you want to buy until the utility of said gadget is worth to you what its price is.