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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

It bugs me that the Fed has no mechanism to really deal with supply-shock driven inflation. Prices are shooting up, but not strongly correlated to money supply at the moment. They’re shooting up because there are a dozen or more entirely capricious and totally self-inflicted supply-shocks due to bizzaro tariff “policy”, disastrous military adventurism, and general erosion of the USD the prime vessel for international trade.

The Fed tightening the money supply isn’t going to materially bring prices down, because the money supply isn’t driving the price increases.

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> the Fed has no mechanism to really deal with supply-shock driven inflation.

Inflation is just a change in the ratio of money to stuff. You can reduce inflation by increasing the stuff or reducing the money, and cause it by doing the opposite. There's no requirement that the solution is applied to "the same factor", either works.

Sure, if you're wanting to assign blame or worried about externalities these things start to matter. But monetary policy is a perfectly fine tool for dealing with inflation, regardless of the cause.

Note: inflation causes prices to rise, but that doesn't mean that all changes in price are caused by inflation.

You’re describing only one flavor of inflation. What the Fed is supposed to care about is price stability, and lots of things influence prices, and not all of them are money supply and/or new money supply correspondent.

We saw this during COVID, the prices of things shot through the roof because of a combination of supply-chain shocks as well as the already well capitalized seizing the opportunity to spend their war chests locking down as much of the available supply as possible, which resulted in consolidation, which resulted in less available supply.

The random trade wars directly cause goods to cost more for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, it’s just a tax masquerading as a price increase, but the Fed deals in stabilizing prices, not taxes. So, it changing the money supply parameters does nothing.

The weakening of the international trade position of the USD writ large also causes prices to go up for no good reason, and nothing about that is going to be resolved by the Fed fiddling with the money supply parameters because it has to do with the stability and reliability of the U.S. as a trustworthy geopolitical operator, which the Fed can do next to nothing about.

The inflation being experienced as price instability/increases is being induced acutely by terrible fiscal & trade policy, but the Fed is acting to try to “fix it” using monetary policy, which won’t work at all. So, what’s the point? Just to look like it’s doing something?

Inflation isn't like ice cream that comes in assorted flavors. It's a simple ratio (hard to measure in practice, but still conceptually simple).

If one side of a ratio is fluctuating (for whatever reason) the ratio's value can be stabilized by making corresponding adjustments to the other side. Amount of goods drops 10%? Reduce the money supply by 10%, bam!, no inflation.

There may be all sorts of policy or political reasons for not doing this, but that's not the same thing as saying that it's necessarily ineffective because the inflation in question is the wrong "flavor".

Agreed. The argument the person you're responding to should be making is 'Tightening monetary policy will bring down inflation but may cause severe negative side effects if the original cause of that inflation isn't monetary.'

That's something that's interesting to debate. Especially given recent experience on the opposite side when loosened COVID monetary supply in response to supply limitation boomeranged into inflation by turbocharging demand.

Ultimately though, tighter monetary policy will (full stop, no if's) act as a brake on inflation, explicitly because it will reduce aggregate demand. Less money to chase goods => some demanders stop trying => lower prices.

That 'demanders stopping' is often also an economic slowdown is a different issue.

Exactly!

Additionally, immense government spending is offsetting anything the Fed can do, whereas in now-ancient times they tended to cooperate better.

Isn't the goal then demand destruction?

The net effect is demand destruction. The US shouldn't be exporting diesel when it lacks sufficient refining capacity to make up for all of the capacity destroyed or unavailable from the US war of choice with Iran. And as the price of US domestic diesel goes to $6+, oil demand is going down both because there's insufficient refining capacity and there's a general slow down in the economy from the added inflation baked-in by higher oil prices and higher diesel prices.

I thought about this as well. Maybe you have to slow down the entire economy to compensate for the missing supply.

> It bugs me that the Fed has no mechanism to really deal with supply-shock driven inflation.

I mean, what would that actually look like? The Fed is insulated from democratic accountability, for very good reasons, but flipside of that is that their powers are intentionally limited. If they had the same immunity to public opinion but with the power to address supply shocks, that would quickly veer into tyranny.

It's a careful balancing act and there is no perfect solution. What's supposed to happen is that Congress acts on supply-shock driven inflation, but this current Congress would rather eat a bag of broken glass than actually govern, which the Fed can't really do anything about.

What it would look like, at the barest minimum, would be the Fed rightly and with receipts calling out the fact that they’re a monetary policy function, and that the current inflationary problems aren’t a monetary one, so if the U.S. would like something done about its inflation issues, then it needs to look someplace else besides the Fed to deal with it.

It doesn’t have to do anything to monetary policy when monetary policy isn’t the problem. It can do nothing.

It’s not the Fed’s job to try to fix terrible fiscal & trade policy, but that’s now what it’s basically trying to do. So, it’s become a political function by virtue of the political apparatus offloading the consequences of its idiocy onto the Fed to clean up after it with a set of tools that can’t even actually do the job.

Yeeep, inflation right now is not a monetary phenomenon. There's also general corporate greed and ever-increasing monopolization, helped out by Trump's lax regulatory hand

Interest rates rising aren't going to fix these sources of inflation.

> inflation right now is not a monetary phenomenon

It usually isn't. That doesn't change that raising rates should slow down credit creation a bit. That reduces demand in a supply-constrained economy. It also reduces risk appetites, which helps in a perilous world. (Finally, it gives rate-cutting headroom for when someone levered blows up.)

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