Margaret Goodwin -- Economics Lessons for Liberals: Inflation

ECONOMICS LESSONS FOR LIBERALS: INFLATION

By Margaret Goodwin
March 27, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

This past week, the Federal Reserve announced that it’s going to buy $300 billion worth of long-term Treasury bills over the next six months, and $750 billion of mortgage-backed securities, to try to loosen up credit and lower mortgage rates. It was also announced that they’re not going to raise taxes to come up with this additional trillion-plus dollars (on top of the recent bailouts and stimulus bill). Instead, they would just crank up the printing presses and print up the money.

How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

Wasn’t it loose credit that created the current financial crisis they’re purportedly trying to get us out of? Aren’t mortgage-backed securities the “toxic assets” that precipitated the collapse of all those banks and financial institutions that we’re already bailing out with our tax dollars? These are the very building blocks of the biggest Ponzi scheme in economic history, but the Fed, in its infinite wisdom, sees fit to gamble 3/4 of a trillion dollars of our money on the most discredited and dangerous financial instrument ever concocted to dupe unsuspecting investors. Only, at this point, they can hardly be said to be unsuspecting.

We’re supposed to be placated by the fact that, this time, they’re not using our tax dollars, but are printing up the money on their little printing presses. So, therefore, it doesn’t cost us anything, right? That would seem to be what they expect us to believe.

Economics for Liberals, Lesson #1. When the Fed prints new money, it devalues all the money that’s currently in circulation. Printing more money literally dilutes the value of everybody’s savings, investments, salaries, and retirement funds.

Currency has no intrinsic value; it’s merely symbolic of the value of goods and services that can be exchanged. The only way to increase the total value in a system is to increase the production of goods and services that somebody wants to consume. The sum total of the currency in a system represents the sum total of the real value in the system (goods and services produced). The value that each unit of currency represents is the ratio of the total units of currency to the total actual value in the system. When the actual value (goods and services produced) remains stable, but the total units of currency are increased, each unit of currency represents less of the total actual value and, consequently, has less purchasing power. That’s what’s known as inflation.

Inflation is simply another type of taxation. Instead of taxing you on each incremental unit of value you produce, the Fed simply dilutes the value of everything you currently have, as well as every dollar you will earn in the future. It’s an invisible tax, because you don’t see the government taking it away from you. You see higher prices for everything you buy, and you blame the producers. But the producers are paying higher prices for everything they have to purchase to produce what they sell to you.

So everybody’s stuck paying higher prices for everything, but they don’t have any more money. So everybody’s purchasing power is reduced, making everybody, in real terms, poorer than they were before the currency was diluted. That’s because the money that was printed up by the government was not distributed to the people whose currency lost its value, but rather was used to buy whatever the Fed buys with it. — In this case, toxic assets that they know are overvalued.

How do I know with such certainty they are overvalued? Because, if they were not overvalued, they’d be able to be sold on the free market. The very fact that government has to buy them up indicates they’re not worth the price at which the government is buying them.

Economics for Liberals, Lesson #2. The value of an investment is based on the ratio of risk to potential reward. If the risk is greater than the potential rewards, the investment is overvalued and nobody will buy it unless the risk is reduced or the reward potential is increased. In many investments, the risk is simply the risk of losing what you invested, so the risk can be reduced by lowering the price. When a balance is reached between risk and potential, buyers can be found on the free market who are willing to assume the risk.

But, when the government assumes the risk, the people making the decisions aren’t risking their own money. They’re risking the taxpayers’ money, either directly (through taxation) or indirectly (through inflation). In this case, the Fed is cranking up the printing presses and diluting all of our savings, investments, salaries, and retirement funds to purchase investments that are known to be bad before they buy them. If any corporate CFO were to behave that way, knowing what we all know today, they would be fired.

Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts!

And, to add insult to injury, they think we’re stupid enough to believe it isn’t costing us anything because they aren’t raising our taxes — yet. But the biggest irony of all is that the purpose used to justify this devious machination is to perpetuate the very circumstances (loose credit and easy availability of mortgages) that got us into this economic crisis in the first place.

Just how stupid do they think we are? – And just how stupid are we, to put up with this?

Margaret Goodwin has a political opinion blog called Government is Not Your Daddy. She's also a regular political analyst on The Constitutional Matters Project, and has had articles published on a number of other Web sites. A conservative libertarian, she believes in free will and the free market. Before becoming a member of “the vast right wing conspiracy,” she worked in the software industry for 12 years and, before that, was a self-employed accountant.