Is there a single western country which didn’t print massive amounts of money following COVID and prior to that with 2008?
I remember seeing tons of economics articles talking about how the consequences of monetary expansion were historically being overrated by economists in the past and that countries have far more capacity than previously thought. But that was easily said during the good times when spending is high.
Blaming it all on a war in Eastern Europe seems to be convenient excuse but there’s a reason you don’t spend wildly during good times, so you have the capacity to spend during the bad times. This has consistent been a critique of modern monetarist and Keynes policy (although you could argue it’s far more monetarist since a Keynesian approach would be via things like infrastructure investments for working class jobs, instead of just endless spending on backchannel megacorporate dealing in thousand page bills).
We’ve seen inflation in different areas for two lears - lumber (both supply side by mills shutting down from covid , and demand side from people doing construction projects due to covid), imports (shipping chaos from covid and the evergiven didn’t help), silicon chips and their knockons into things from cars to network switches due to china’s covid policies, to oil (demand evaporated due to covid, then when demand came back supply didn’t follow), then Russia caused more supply constriction in both oil and grain supplies.
I remember seeing tons of economics articles talking about how the consequences of monetary expansion were historically being overrated by economists in the past and that countries have far more capacity than previously thought. But that was easily said during the good times when spending is high.
Blaming it all on a war in Eastern Europe seems to be convenient excuse but there’s a reason you don’t spend wildly during good times, so you have the capacity to spend during the bad times. This has consistent been a critique of modern monetarist and Keynes policy (although you could argue it’s far more monetarist since a Keynesian approach would be via things like infrastructure investments for working class jobs, instead of just endless spending on backchannel megacorporate dealing in thousand page bills).