Re:The Old Are Eating the Young
by roenxi on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @08:35AM
(#14552237)
Unlike dark matter, we can measure the money. Take the M2 monetary aggregate ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 ). Unless the US has doubled the amount of resources since the financial crisis, the value of the dollars should be reducing vs goods or assets, as the supply of dollars is increasing rapidly.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Yes, and we can also measure the inflation rate, which is pretty flat: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
So why don't these two line up? I submit two candidate explanations:
a) inflation is actually more an exchange-rate phenomenon, especially vs the dollar, so printing dollars or virtual M2 dollars makes remarkably little difference;
b) CPI does a poor job of capturing cost-of-living due to housing.