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Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the money supply M2 grew 40%. The economy grew 19%. There was no reason to believe there was some long-term change in the velocity of money. Just from these numbers alone you can expect about 18% inflation. And, sure enough, the price level increased by about 20%.
You can repeat this for other countries. The UK money supply M2 grew 24%. The economy did not grow at all. Expectation: 24% increase in price level. Reality: 24% increase in price level.
Denying that increasing the money supply as was done in 2020 would cause inflation, or that it would be "transitory", comes from the same motivated reasoning that applied to the entire era of covid policy. Criticizing a heavy-handed response made you persona non grata in professional circles, so you didn't. As for placing bets on it to make money, the risk is not the existing consequences of government policy, but that you're betting on how deranged your local government is. Inflation is not the only consideration in such a circumstance, so it's no surprise that even people putting their money where there mouth is were bad sources of predictions.
I think there's a bit of a talking-past-each-other thing with "transitory" inflation. The pro-transitory argument is we pumped a ton of money into the system during covid, but then we stopped pumping money in at that elevated rate, so once all the price gains from that bump in the money supply bubble through the economy we go back to the same moderate inflation rate we had before. And that case is basically true and has been borne out.
The anti-transitory argument is hey we got this massive jump in prices and then the prices never went back down. Which is also true. Of course, that's not strictly speaking an inflation problem anymore. Now it's a cost of living issue.
The assumption that once the price rises slowed down everyone would be happy again was the problem. Absolute levels matter as well as the rate of change!
To be clear we aren’t back to normal. We have hovered about a fifty percent above the recent norm.
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Yeah that's fair. I'll concede the point, I guess I was forgetting how strong the "transitory" claims were.
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