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ssri's avatar

Is your summary of the situation with France hoarding gold and exacerbating (or even launching?) the Great Depression another recommendation to go with "flexible" fiat monies instead of "rigid" commodity varieties?

" If, however, the monetary authority manages to anchor both expectations about a stable output-value of money and expectations about future spending, then you can largely recession-proof your economy. You will still get a business cycle, just a much flatter one than there used to be. This is how Australia avoided the Great Recession and experienced the longest ever-recorded period without a technical recession." Yeah, OZ!! Why can't the rest of us learn from your successes??

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ssri's avatar

"If we do not talk of store of value but instead analyse how money can either be an exchange good or an asset held for future use, we can consider in a more considered way—connected to normal supply and demand—how money functions." Perhaps this is some "theory vs. practice" territory. I have long felt that the MMTers and others don't give the store of value function the attention and merit it deserves. Your viewing it as an asset with supply and demand implications is helpful and interesting, but even held as an asset, it is essentially an abstract surrogate place holder for the value previously created or obtained (with that attendant fragility, etc.). Postponing consumption for saving and investing is usually considered a good personal finance practice, even if the economists might like to see velocity increase. Naturally, today we need to recognize that the current $ values of our investment portfolios include both a real wealth added element and a phony inflation added quantity.

"Inflation and deflation are monetary phenomena, being continuing shifts in the output-value of money. They occur for straightforward supply-and-demand reasons." I fully agree with this, but the "adjustments or distortions" you describe reflect the difficulties of trying to manage an economy where the participants (in the US anyway) make 10 to 30 billion purchasing decisions every day.

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