this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
368 points (94.9% liked)
Political Memes
8081 readers
3235 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Focusing on money supply misses the most significant factor in inflation, missed by all armchair economists- the private banking system.
A $1 million asset is not part of the money supply, if it's value increases to $2 million it has no impact on inflation.
If the owner of that asset then aquires a loan against that asset and spends that money, they have increased the money in circulation. That is a far more significant driver of inflation than government spending. Meanwhile the FED (or equivalent) has not printed one additional dollar.
These models don't work because they ignore the MOST significant driver of inflation
Wellll... they work just fine for their intended purpose - demonstrate the correlation between 2 variables in an understandable way.
What you are (correctly) referencing is that there is a much more complex system in reality than the simplified model - they literally exist to try and explain difficult concepts in digestible ways. Everyone's eyes glaze over if you try to do the "if this, then that, but if this then the other (at 45 variables level).
So yes, inflation is wildly more complex than just money supply or demand push inflation (the flavour the Phillips curve is looking at).
But the people in this thread bitching about economists dumbing stuff down so they can understand it resulting in simplistic models that don't reflect the real world would be just as quick to bitch about how they're in an ivory tower because they refuse to explain things in laymans terms.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
What's the loan money in your example if it's not an increase of the money supply?
Or a reduction in savings.
Edit: though it is more complex than that because the banks can reloan the money as others put it into their savings.