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Inflation: Economies
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"Inflation typically lags growth by about a year, so the slowdown in growth since the spring of last year has only just started to depress core CPI,'' says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York. "The process has much further to run.''
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Inflation ... improves the lot of corporate - and individual - borrowers by increasing their earnings and marginally eroding the value of their debts (and savings). It constitutes a disincentive to save and an incentive to borrow, to consume, and, alas, to speculate. "The Economist" called it "a splendid way to transfer wealth from savers to borrowers."
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By now, emerging economies with very diverse structures have successfully adopted inflation targeting. This suggests that inflation targeting is a flexible framework that can be adapted to the conditions of a particular country and over time. In a number of countries, inflation targeting was introduced under adverse circumstances, often after other nominal anchors such as monetary growth or the exchange rate had failed. Such countries include, for example, Brazil, the Czech Republic and Turkey. In some emerging economies the inflation targeting framework has already passed some pretty challenging tests. In the case of Brazil for example, such tests included large currency depreciations, including those following the LTCM and Russian crises.2
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These policies were successful and by the end of 1924 inflation had been brought under control and the economy began to improve. By 1928 unemployment had fallen to 8.4 per cent of the workforce. The German people gradually gained a new faith in their democratic system and began to find the extremist solutions proposed by people such as Adolf Hitler unattractive.
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In the literature of early modern economic history, the predominant though quite misleading explanation for this inflation has been population growth. To be sure, population growth, acting upon relatively fixed (inelastic) land and other natural resources, resulting in diminishing returns and rising marginal costs, may well explain the rise in the relative prices of some specific commodities, such as grain and timber (whose English prices did rise the most over this 130-year period). But demographic factors alone cannot explain a rise in the price level; for inflation is fundamentally though not uniquely monetary in origin and character. Indeed, since England's population in the early 1520s was only
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Still, the late preeminent economist James Tobin went as far as calling inflation "the grease on the wheels of the economy". What rate of inflation is desirable? The answer is: it depends on whom you ask. The European Central Bank maintains an annual target of 2 percent. Other central banks - the Bank of England, for instance - proffer an "inflation band" of between 1.5 and 2.5 percent. The Fed has been known to tolerate inflation rates of 3-4 percent.
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