Rising Prices Are Caused by Monetary Inflation, Not Greed

MisesWIre.com 08/30/2024

One of the myths being endlessly repeated in this inflationary cycle is the myth that rising prices are caused by greed. For example, Democratic senator Bob Casey is running around Pennsylvania campaigning on the idea while claiming he’ll solve the problem if you re-elect him. Kamala Harris is doing the same. However, the fact that greed doesn’t cause inflation is obvious if we just ask why prices across the board have surged since 2020. Since then, consumer prices rose more than twenty percent, knocking off about a fourth of the value of every dollar you hold. Is that all because greed suddenly got worse after 2020 for some unknown reason? If so, why is it that greed was magically barely a problem at all for many years during the last decade when official CPI inflation rates often came in between 1 and 2 percent?

There is no explanation for this greed thesis, and the reason is that there is only one cause of generally rising prices— the thing we could call price inflation. The only cause of this is monetary inflation—that is, a rising money supply or, as sometimes stated more casually: printing new money.

So, if the question is why did we see the consumer price index go up by more than 20 percent over the past four years—with home prices rising by 50 percent and wages not keeping up? The answer is that the central banks literally created trillions of new dollars during that period. (When we say they “printed” this money, we don’t mean they physically printed it, although they sometimes do. When we say the central bank “printed money”, we mean the central bank created new money out of nothing.)

Recall how during the covid lockdowns, the government was paying people to stay home and not work. Where did this money come from? The central bank printed it. There was not money to be had from the Treasury, of course, as the federal government itself was already running huge deficits. The central bank created so much new money in fact, that the money supply has increased by 32 percent since early 2020. Nearly one quarter of all the dollars that are out there right now, were created since then. These are astounding numbers.

We can go back further than that. You want to know why stock prices and real estate prices have been going up so relentlessly for more than ten years? It’s because since 2009, when we began the age of quantitative easing, the money supply is up by 185 percent.

For many years, monetary inflation appeared primarily as rising prices in assets like housing. That’s why CPI inflation seemed “low” between 2010 and 2020. Eventually, the piper must be paid for relentless monetary expansion of the type we’ve experienced since 2009. The frenzy of money creation that occurred since 2020 — and the rising prices that followed — have made this clear.

Of course, politicians are now trying to have it both ways. First, they’re claiming that there isn’t much price inflation at all, and Bidenomics already solved that somehow. At the same time they’re saying that yes, there is price inflation, but it’s the fault of greedy corporations who are trying to price-gouge you.

Neither of these claims are true, though. Prices aren’t falling, or even flat. By the government’s measure, food now costs 26 percent more than it did only four years ago and prices are still rising.

Last month, the feds’ own measure said there was 3 percent growth in the CPI. That’s 3 percent on top of all the other increases of recent years. The farther down you are on the economic ladder, the lower the odds your income has come close to keeping up with that. Meanwhile, home prices have risen far beyond the CPI measure. Then there’s that other claim that if there is any price inflation at all, it’s all caused by greed. Yet, the real cause of rising prices is right in front of us. It’s 15 years of money printing to bail out banks that started back in 2009. And on top of this, we got even more of that newly printed COVID money.

The problem is not greed, it’s the growth in the money supply. Its elected officials and their friends who CAUSED this problem, of course, but they certainly aren’t going to tell you that.