Readers of GP’s Economy category know that I like to write about how money-printing, now called “Quantitative Easing” (QE), actually drags on the economy (rather than stimulating it). In the long run, QE is just a ripoff to inflate asset bubbles for the Point-One Percent – and stick the rest of the economy with the fallout.
The topic is obscure, but it explains much of what has gone wrong in the U.S. economy as well as Europe, Japan, etc. (Overgrowth of the State explains the rest.) But today, I’ll spare you my verbiage and refer you to Pater Tenebrarum’s. Key passage:
When central banks or commercial banks add new money to the money supply, not one iota of real wealth is created…
However, monetary pumping does disturb the finely tuned dynamic processes [of the economy], as it distorts interest rates and prices. Economic calculation is then falsified and malinvestment invariably ensues. Have the housing bubbles in e.g. Spain and the US not shown this quite clearly?…The emergence of such illusory profits leads to the consumption of capital..
Eventually it turns out that companies actually lack the funds to maintain their real capital. This is what we mean when we refer to the pool of real funding being under pressure: the capital structure has been damaged. Actors in the economy need to…”repair” [the economy’s real capital]…Then the economy is in “recession”, but this is really a healing process. It takes time to heal.
Additional money printing actively sabotages this healing process. It achieves nothing but even more impoverishment in the end, especially if it succeeds in igniting another boom by redistributing existing wealth and spurring more capital-consuming activities…
Inflationism is apparently more popular than ever. It doesn’t seem to matter how often and how consistently it fails to produce the desired results, there are always more people in the world who have an epiphany about saving the economy by printing money…[until] the economy has become so structurally damaged…that if banks indeed were to lend out more money [as the money-printers desire], they would be almost guaranteed to lose most of it.
If you have the patience, Read The Whole Thing.
Addendum: By the way, the Swiss don’t get it, after all. Last Sunday, 78% of Swiss voters were against having a sound currency. (Updates my earlier post, Do The Swiss Get It?)
UPDATE: The Japanese people suffer from their latest version of QE, even as their Nikkei stock index sits at seven-year highs. In the end, the U.S. will fare no better (and probably worse).