I have no doubt that as we keep pushing more and more money into the system to keep the ship afloat that it may prove to be inflationary, but how much and when? We already saw the hawks point towards rising oil and gold prices as evidence but then those commodities have come back from their highs – perhaps there is a degree of speculation at play, or the fundamentals changed as prices rose, it is easy to suppose, difficult to factually nail down.
The idea that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomena is a famous Milton Friedman quote, but there is a difference at play now versus the way things worked in the past in terms of how the timing might work.
When money was ‘real’ (backed by precious metals), debasement had a very immediate effect, and once it became apparent people would take money out of circulation and have it re-minted elsewhere; that is why ‘sterling silver’ has that name, because British sterling was considered to be of a high quality, the …