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U.S. inflation falls to 3%, lowest level in more than 2 years, as price pressures ease
(www.politico.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Some prices have gone down, but you don't want a deflationary economy.
Ideally what you want is a ~2% inflation rate, and wages that increase in tandem. The US job market has remained incredibly resiliant throughout all of this, so hopefully it is close to balancing out.
I see this repeated often, but is there actually research and evidence backing this up or just policymakers masquerading their wants as hard law?
The idea is that a small predictable rate of inflation discourages people and financial entities from hoarding cash and instead invest it in places that make the economy move.
This has been the prevailing theory since the end of the Great Depression, and it’s generally worked out pretty well.
The caveat to this is that you need wage growth to remain in step with inflation, otherwise you are just screwing working class people over.
I know what the idea is, but is it actually true in practice? If the rate of deflation was, say, 2%, who would actually hoard cash just because it'd be supposedly worth 2% more? I highly doubt customers would, especially since it's not like businesses would automatically cut prices by 2%. As for businesses, why would they hoard that cash when they can make investments that would increase the amount of cash they have? Surely, if a 2% increase in value was so worth hoarding cash, why aren't they all just hoarding cash into interest-paying accounts that pay 4% in a 2% inflation environment? Constant inflation has been the prevailing theory, but it doesn't mean it's the optimal setup.
Consumers wouldn’t, because they still need things like food and shelter, which they already spend most of their income on. But corporations and wealthy individuals absolutely would. In a deflationary environment, the value of money sitting still in a big savings account goes up while the value of goods and assets goes down. They shift their wealth into whatever vehicle they feel will provide reliable growth.
This was one of the problems we had during the Great Depression. Nobody was investing in new or expanding businesses, so no new jobs were being created.
That's assuming deflation was the cause of that instead of simply being a symptom of the collapse of the financial system. Also, in a deflationary environment, money sitting in a savings account wouldn't necessarily collect interest, in fact the interest rate for a savings account could even be negative. Either way, a healthy investment environment would provide much greater returns than a 2% increase in value of money sitting in an account. Consumers continuing to buy things means there are clear business opportunities.