The political economy of inflation

For the last 40 years, macroeconomics has been dominated by Milton Friedman’s view that inflation occurs when the supply of money rises more quickly than economic output – ‘too much money chasing too few goods’, as the saying goes. If inflation is always due to an imbalance of money supply and output, central banks alone determine the path of inflation, and fiscal policy merely has a redistributive function. This paper draws on historical and empirical evidence as well as recent theoretical literature to show that this view is mistaken. Monetary policy has redistributive effects, and fiscal policy affects the money supply. It is therefore impossible to separate them in practice. Both fiscal and monetary policy have inflationary consequences, and because their distributional effects are different, monetary policy cannot fully offset fiscal decisions. Fiscal and monetary policy are influenced by political decisions and are themselves political in nature. Since inflation reflects spending and saving patterns which are affected by political choices, it is fundamentally a political phenomenon.

Central banks and inflation: where do we stand and how did we get here?

The inability of central banks to attain their target inflation rates in recent years has raised questions about the extent to which central banks can control the inflation process. This paper discusses the evolution of thought and evidence since the 1960s on the determinants of inflation and the role that should be played by central banks. The paper highlights the roles played by two streams of thought associated with Milton Friedman: monetarist theories predicting a key role for monetary aggregates in determining inflation and the rise in popularity of the expectations-augmented Phillips curve. The author discusses the influence of the latter in determining the modern consensus on central-bank institutions and the relative roles for fiscal and monetary policies. The paper concludes with a discussion of macroeconomic developments since 2010 and current policy options to stimulate the economy and restore inflation to its target levels, including the merits of ‘helicopter money’.

On capital, saving, and investment in the twenty-first century: a reply to Hein

With our book Saving and Investment in the Twenty-First Century: The Great Divergence (published as open access), we present a comprehensive theoretical explanation as well as empirical evidence for the phenomenon of low interest rates observed in the OECD countries and China and make various economic policy recommendations based on it. We have developed a new capital-theoretical approach to address these important issues. In what follows, we will discuss some of the more critical parts of Eckhard Hein’s otherwise very sympathetic review of our book.

The methodology for assessing interest-rate policy rules: some comments

This paper is critical of the conceptual foundations and methodology adopted by Smithin (2020) in his exploration of the impact of different interest-rate policy rules on inflation. His modelling framework is too narrow to adequately discriminate between different interest-rate rules in terms of their broader macroeconomic impacts.

The methodology for assessing interest-rate policy rules: a reply

This note is a brief reply to Watts (2021), who has been critical of the conceptual foundations and methodology in a discussion of the impact of different interest rate policy rules on inflation in Smithin (2020). The reply concludes that the case for a ‘zero real policy rate of interest’ (ZRPR), rather than a ‘zero interest rate policy’ (ZIRP), emerges unscathed.

Saving and Investment in the Twenty-First Century: The Great Divergence – some comments from a post-Keynesian perspective*

This contribution discusses the book Saving and Investment in the Twenty-First Century: The Great Divergence by von Weizsäcker/Krämer (2021). It touches upon the underlying theoretical perspectives, von Weizsäcker’s neo-Austrian view and Krämer’s short-run Keynesian theory, and it proposes an alternative based on post-Keynesian distribution and growth theory. It also reviews the economic policy proposals of the book with respect to government deficits and debt, as well as international coordination of current-account balances, and finds broad agreement with modern post-Keynesian proposals, with some deviation when it comes to macroeconomic policy coordination among monetary, fiscal and wage/incomes policies. It concludes that these economic policy agreements should not be taken as a surprise. The requirements of stabilising government deficits and debt, in the face of an excess of private saving over private investment at full employment, and an excess of the private desire to hold net financial assets over the private-sector supply of financial liabilities, are based on solid national income and financial accounting. They are thus compatible with different macroeconomic theories regarding long-run equilibrium and adjustments towards it.