When deflation becomes a self-reinforcing deflationary loop, as in the 1930's in the US, it's horrible:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...

That's why Japan has been trying to fight deflation for decades.

There is no more a deflationary loop than an inflationary loop.

Inflation/deflation happens when there is a mismatch between the supply of money and the value of goods and services in the economy. This mismatch usually happens because the central bank prints deficit money.

Deflation in the 1930s happened because the Fed went the other way, refusing to create money. This continued until the late 30s when the Fed changed course, and (you guessed it) produced lots of inflation.

Not an endorsement for deflation but this week I discovered this [1] because the Argentinian president mentioned that. In that context it makes me thought that the president cherry picked that work because his government economic measures are in that direction now.

[1] "In Defense of Deflation": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40206205

The fed doesn't print "deficit money". They are forbidden from doing that and even if they did, who is going to spend it?

The treasury prints money. Remember when Janet Yelled said she is ready to mint a one trillion USD coin in case it is needed to avoid the debt ceiling.

What the Fed does is a duration transformation. Commercial banks can deposit US treasuries at the central bank and receive a claim on those treasures in the form of liquid central bank reserves. This is done because people keep holding more and more short term duration deposits in their checking accounts or at brokerage accounts. Buying a 10 year treasury with deposits that only have a 1 day duration is quite insane. This means that in practice whatever deposits you are keeping in your account are missing from the economy.

The US federal government can run a deficit and it can run it regardless of the financing conditions. It will merely pay an exorbitant interest rate if it chooses to do so.

Here is a loosely related paper:

https://www.elsevier.es/en-revista-investigacion-economica-1...

In an equilibrium economy, the expected net money supply is always zero, that is, every dollar in the money supply is offset by a dollar in debt. So called inside money.

If the neoclassical theory is true, then attempts at extracting seigniorage would immediately be spotted and no inflation could ever occur. The inverse is also true. If the government artificially restricted the money supply, people would find alternative means of providing themselves with the ability to exchange. So the expectation is that the government has zero power or ability to influence the economy with monetary policy. The only reason why it would have the ability to do so, is because it has made those alternatives illegal.

> The fed doesn't print "deficit money".

It's a euphemism for the modern way of simply issuing more debt, and more debt to cover existing debt.

> Deflation in the 1930s happened because the Fed went the other way, refusing to create money.

Exactly: In periods like the 1930's, central must lend to banks at lower rates and buy fixed-income securities with newly created money as necessary, in order to prevent a deflationary loop. In the 1930's the Fed did the opposite, sending the economy into an even more painful deflationary spiral.

Economists say that, but I'd be curious to hear from the "common person" in Japan what they thought about the lack of GDP growth.

Now almost certain it's not great for humanity in a long term view (less investments in the future etc) but I'm not sure it has to be worse for the present generation.

One of the key things that made the 30s so horrible was that Hoover and Roosevelt both pressured industry to not cut wages, which they complied with, but they cut employment instead.

The key thing was the Fed mismanaging and misunderstanding how money worked. My dad (grew up in the 30s) said that simply "nobody had any money".

I think there were a lot of problems, but most of them boil down to "heavy-handed government intervention in the markets". That includes pressure to keep wages high and mismanagement at the Fed.

> I think there were a lot of problems, but most of them boil down to "heavy-handed government intervention in the markets".

The Fed was very hands off in the early 1930s:

> […] At the onset of the Great Depression in 1929–1930, the Fed maintained a “hands-off” approach, believing the economy simply needed to “wring out its excesses.” This is somewhat ironic in that Fed policy itself greatly contributed to the financial excesses of the 1920s. Nevertheless, the Fed failed to recognize the nature of the economy.

> When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Fed’s instinct was to do little and let the economy and markets correct. But the Fed seemed to have no sense of how big the credit bubble from the 1920s was. Consequently, from 1929–1933, the Fed remained committed to a tight monetary policy. Under the gold standard then in force, when the gold balances held by the government contracted, the money supply did so as well. Faced with the increasing economic turmoil, US businesses and the public at large trusted gold more than paper currency. Overseas investors, fearing a potential devaluation of the dollar, preferred gold too. This created a gold drain. As the Fed’s gold stocks declined, the United States unwittingly reduced credit in the economy. Over the 1929–1933 period, the US money supply contracted sharply, declining by roughly one third between 1929 and 1933, and the country experienced its worst ever downturn, with unemployment soaring to roughly 25%.

* https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2015/09/17/the-ghost...

It was the interventionist policies of new New Deal and its various spending and jobs programs that helped the recovery begin. As well as getting off the gold standard:

* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-grea...

If you think things are bad with government intervention and regulation, you may wish to examine history about things before it became a thing:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1896

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

IMHO the (US) financial system has been much more stable with more of a government / Fed hands-on approach.

Certainly there were crashes (1987) and bubbles (1999), but that was more on the private sector side. At least one problem was due to not enough oversight:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

>My dad (grew up in the 30s) said that simply "nobody had any money".

People hear this and think "everyone was broke", but there literally was just no money. We hadn't fully figured out modern monetary policy at that point, and the old ideas of austerity reigned supreme for policymakers.

I remember thinking about this when my dad lost his job after the 2008 crash. He worked on machines that made computer chips. People still wanted computer chips. And yet there was no means to connect the two.

Your clarification is accurate.

> the old ideas of austerity reigned supreme for policymakers.

And yet, no. No one spoke of austerity. The government wasn't austere. Hoover's Treasury Sec., Andrew Mellon, wanted to "liquidate, liquidate, liquidate" in 1929, but that didn't happen. More government largesse than Roosevelt went with would not have resolved things, not all other things being equal.

> The key thing was the Fed mismanaging and misunderstanding how money worked.

The key thing was the Fed was (early on) complying with how the gold standard worked, which is a finite amount of cash being available, and only being able to be increased by having more of the shiny stuff.

> When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Fed’s instinct was to do little and let the economy and markets correct. But the Fed seemed to have no sense of how big the credit bubble from the 1920s was. Consequently, from 1929–1933, the Fed remained committed to a tight monetary policy. Under the gold standard then in force, when the gold balances held by the government contracted, the money supply did so as well. Faced with the increasing economic turmoil, US businesses and the public at large trusted gold more than paper currency. Overseas investors, fearing a potential devaluation of the dollar, preferred gold too. This created a gold drain. As the Fed’s gold stocks declined, the United States unwittingly reduced credit in the economy. Over the 1929–1933 period, the US money supply contracted sharply, declining by roughly one third between 1929 and 1933, and the country experienced its worst ever downturn, with unemployment soaring to roughly 25%.

* https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2015/09/17/the-ghost...

This is one of the reason why the gold standard (or any "hard" currency) is a bad idea:

* https://www.moneyandbanking.com/commentary/2016/12/14/why-a-...

The sooner the US (and other countries) got off the gold standard, the sooner their economies started to recover:

> In the end, recovery from the Great Depression does not begin until countries give up on the combination of the Bagehot Rule and of commitment to sound gold-standard finance. Those countries that have central banks willing to print up enough money so that people are willing to spend it--it is when you adopt such policies that your economy begins to recover. If you don’t, you become France, which sticks to the gold standard all the way up to 1937, and never gets a recovery. When World War II begins, Nazi Germany’s production--equal to France's in 1933--had doubled between 1933 and 1939. French production had fallen by 15%.

* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-grea...

There was a misstep in 1936 when there was pressure to raise rates and also to reduce spending due to deficits, and so rates were raised and austerity was enacted… and the economy tanked again.

Cutting wages never works because you need to cut the wages according to the marginal utility of a dollar and cut the wages where the utility per dollar is lowest. Now here is a rhetorical question, who exactly do you think has the power to set wages? Obviously those with a low marginal utility of money. This means the wages of those with the highest marginal utility get cut. The money saved from the wage cuts will find its way to the capital markets, while the money spent on consumption has decreased leading to a reinforcement of the problem. This will have to continue until the person with the lowest marginal utility of money has received a wage cut, which generally happens when the company goes bankrupt.

What does "marginal utility of money" mean? Is the person with the lowest "marginal utility of money" the CEO?

Perhaps, but when the industry doesn't cut wages because the government insists on it, and instead you get high unemployment, that's not better.

then an inflationary loop is just as scary... https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Wa...

And when inflation becomes a self-reinforcing inflation loop, we get zimbabwae and argentina and venezuela. The US suffered a few years where I lost a bit over 10% of my savings and income per year. Inflation is currently taught as "correct" in schools but I suspect that's just the current trend.

It's "correct" for those with deep pockets who want the benefit of near zero interest rates steering people into their investment schemes. Force everyone onto a treadmill they control to reap exclusive rewards from the capital of others.

You know those investment schemes are endorsed because they create jobs? Figure out a way to keep everyone employed without them and you have solved the problem.

Uh, no? Japanese people are far poorer than Americans. Japan's GDP PPP Per capita is $33.8k, America's was $76.3k in 2022. That's more than double.

Interesting. I guess things getting cheaper and cheaper can be enjoyable. What was your experience in term of doing business?

> Japan had deflation and as a normal person it was great.

BS.

Deflation means that (on average) people can't afford to buy goods. They simply don't have money to do that!

Japan has essentially zero GDP growth since 1990-s as a result.

>Deflation means that (on average) people can't afford to buy goods. They simply don't have money to do that!

I'm pretty sure Japan never had big unemployment problems, so your claim is BS.

>Japan has essentially zero GDP growth since 1990-s as a result.

GDP is a useless metric, only useful for politicians to brag about their "achievements".

> I'm pretty sure Japan never had big unemployment problems, so your claim is

Japan is solving unemployment by essentially creating BS jobs, like people standing on a corner and holding a sign saying that there's a corner nearby. Meanwhile, good high-paying jobs are extremely hard to get into, and are very stressful.

Remember when it turned out during Fukushima accident that lots of people normally hired to work on the power plant, were essentially unqualified day laborers? That's why.

Japan is NOT in a good place economically. They are essentially wasting millions of lifetimes of human capital.

And yet, somehow, Japan's Human Development Index has been increasing consistently over the last 30 years.

https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/specific-country-data#/coun...

It's mostly a reflection of rising life expectancy. That's great, but it's not really a result of the Japanese economic development.

This is something I learned the other day. Inflation and deflation are both redistributing wealth. Each transaction has someone who is winning and losing. One isn’t automatically worse or better. Maybe it is that both can be bad if there is a lot of it.

> One isn’t automatically worse or better.

Is that really true? Deflation sounds conclusively worse. Everyone starts to hoard money instead of spend it, and the economy goes into a tailspin. Any debt you pay back is with dollars that are worth less. Most anyone in debt, which is a lot of people, should prefer inflation.

We probably shouldn't be basing our economy on debts then, as we tend to do.

No, we probably should. Barter may work okay for when you have chickens to trade for boots, but you'll soon run into limitations. The vast majority of trades people make depend on some kind of future delivery. I don't want supper to show up when I get to work in the morning. It is much more practical to, instead, accept a token of debt (money) from my employer and then see that the debt gets repaid by my employer later when I go to the grocery store.

A debtless economy would be an absolute nightmare.

Why? Debts are like levers, they multiply both growth potential, and failure potential.

Very true. My impression of the US over the past two decades at least though, is that financial services are bleeding many Americans dry even while they believe it’s all to their preferences - that they’re using the levers correctly, while any outside observer would say they’re being taken advantage of, even if it is their choice.

Total credit card interest and fees paid by Americans are up 47% from the high of 2019 •

Overall economic output continues to increase, but it drains so quickly, and increasingly to depreciating assets.

Of the young adults I know, I ask if they do even have a rough budget. Only two couples said yes, none of the singles or other couples. I know many are paying large sums to interest on consumer debt, with student loans looming for later.

I don’t have any other statistics, and now will seek them. It raises the question at least, how might we assess the benefit achieved thanks in part to loans to the majority of households over the past 50-100 years?

• https://wallethub.com/edu/how-much-americans-pay-in-credit-c...

It always depends on where one's wealth and/or income comes from.

The interests of a working person who rents is different from a working person who owns their own home, whose interests are different from a residential real estate investor's, whose interests are different from a business owner's, whose interests are different from a venture capitalist's, whose interests are different from a stock broker's.

also, it's easier to fight inflation because you can always increase the interest rate. With deflation once you reach zero there isn't anywhere realistically else to go. Negative interest rate have happened momentarily but it's not like the US fed can realistically set the rate to -1%

In the depths of the financial crisis in 2008/9 I remember Bernanke saying he would fly helicopters and drop bags of money if it came to that in order to fight deflation taking hold.

>With deflation once you reach zero there isn't anywhere realistically else to go.

Huh? just literally print more money.

That’s what a zero interest rate is, money for free.

Universal basic income or helicopter money is deeply unpopular. That money will not end up in the hands of those who need it.

You dont need "helicopter money". Just create money and spend it on something. Build roads, rails, tanks, whatever.

>That money will not end up in the hands of those who need it.

Yes, but it's irrelevant for this discussion.

Lol, UBI is precisely money directly onto the people's hands. Haven't you heard of GiveDirecly NGO?

>Everyone starts to hoard money instead of spend it, and the economy goes into a tailspin

Ok, imagine people start hoarding money, where are they going to store money? In Banks. Which would use that money to invest in things, like always.

Modern economics are nothing like economics in 1930, but somehow we still base our science on that era.

>Which would use that money to invest in things, like always.

No, people only invest if they see a return. If the return is too low they will simply hold onto the money since interest rates can't go negative too deeply. Your idea only works in a fantasy land with mandated equilibrium. In the real world people don't care if there is an equilibrium or not.

>No, people only invest if they see a return.

I'm talking about banks. That's literally their business. You know, to lend money.

> If the return is too low they will simply hold onto the money since interest rates can't go negative too deeply.

Who talked about interest rate? Why banks cant use THE MONEY THEY HAVE to lend/invest?

> I'm talking about banks. That's literally their business. You know, to lend money.

Their business is to make money. If the economy is in the toilet, it is usually because there is no demand, and if there is no demand businesses and individuals do not need loans to expand and operate, so no one is asking for credit, so banks have no one to lend to.

The banks don't want the/your money: while a savings account is an asset to you, the other side of the ledger is a liability for the bank. And if they are to provide x% to the saver, they have to earn >x% to break even (adding overhead), never mind make money.

Just a little while ago in Europe, there was all sorts of excess savings (especially in Germany) with no places to invest the piles of cash piling up, so you get negative interest rates on savings accounts:

* https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/eu-says-danish-banks-probably-ca...

* https://archive.ph/U8Ds6 / https://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-in-germany-tell-customers...

> Why banks cant use THE MONEY THEY HAVE to lend/invest?

This is not how the banking system works, and has not been for decades. Tobin called the lend-savings model the "Old View" in 1963:

* https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/cowles-discussion-paper-...

Please stop using and talking about the money multiplier, as it just muddles up people's understanding about reality:

* https://www.pragcap.com/r-i-p-the-money-multiplier/

* https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2021...

The way that the bank system works is that banks first create a loan and second look for reserves:

* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/132

The amount of savings that a bank holds has nothing to do with anything. There are entire countries without reserve requirements:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement#Countries_...

An excellent description. I suggest that money is fundamentally a debt. An I.O.U. if you will. Over decades these I.O.U.'s(money) on a nation state wide basis become too numerous for the population as a whole (including government) to pay back. In ancient times the two ways to solve this inability to pay debt were for the King to wage war and steal money from another nation (tribute) or to cancel the nation's debt using a debt jubilee. In the post modern times we live in these options are not politically viable or conscionable. Therefore Governments only have options that involve the use of controlled deflation or inflation of the money supply using tools like interest rates, quantitative easing/tightening or fiscal spending/reduction. These post modern 'tools' only have a certain amount of efficacy and when that manipulating ability loses its power the masses suffer austerity. As in this present era. In ancient times this suffering would lead to political unrest therefore a new leader or King would announce a war or debt jubilee as the only solution. Ultimately issuing a new money (debt system) and cancelling the old is the only solution like a new king issuing a new currency with his image on it. The discussions above mine in my view are about how to manage the effects of the onerous national and private debts with the hope that economies will be able to suffer the effects of austerity until such time as the economy grows out of the debt. This might never happen and often doesn't. In conclusion then a peaceful solution is a debt jubilee where mortgage holders have their debts cancelled and those without debt enjoy a commensurate income boon. (*many of the above original ideas are not mine but collated and interpreted from various professorial sources)

In both cases it tends to be capital holders that win.

The middle class grows when there is stability and neither inflation nor deflation. The constant instability we see only benefits the capital holders who can profit off both the ups and downs.

I’m not sure how many more years of a quasi government organization (that is far too buddy buddy with major capital holders) imposing a tax on existing (inflation) we’ll have to suffer before we get a central bank that exists for the American people and not capital that operates in America.

> before we get a central bank that exists for the American people and not capital that operates in America

The USA is arguably the most capitalistic country/culture/society on Earth, and you're wondering how long it will be until the USA fundamentally changes the core mechanism of its banking to be inherently socialistic?

I can't say when, but it's not happening without a violent revolution that would make 1790s France look like a children's fairy tale.

Most transactions (where the participants are free to choose, that is) are win-win.

> This is something I learned the other day.

Any link you can share?

Edit: Google "disinflation wealth redistribution" provides some relevant results

Except several decades ago we shifted normal people's retirement accounts from pensions to stock market casino accounts.