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From my limited readings of Austrian economic theory, monetary policy is the thing that causes inflation in the first place.

With a fixed money supply, wide-spread inflation is not a thing.



I’m sure people more educated than I can debate about this all day, I’m just saying that in the system we have as it exists today, the expectation is that the federal reserve will increase interest rates to combat inflation, and in turn this makes debt more expensive and increases the risk free yield rate

Edit: and just to be clear where I’m going with this, the market adjusts along these expectations. Why has the housing market been so insanely hot for a year now? In part because money is easy, and everyone believes inflation is coming/here, so getting a 30 year loan on 3% interest is a killer deal. Consequently home values are through the roof. But this counterbalances: you end up with a higher principle and lower interest for the same monthly home payment, and take on the risk that you will be underwater on your mortgage if asset values crash when rates rise.


You are assuming a simulated environment without permanently increasing entropy. Gold doesn't really suffer from increasing entropy but humans do. That's the fundamental problem that makes it impossible to maintain a gold standard or a fixed supply currency that does not account for entropy.

If you were to account for increasing entropy with a negative interest rate then you could maintain a fixed money supply though I would recommend price level targeting to adjust the money supply to the population and economic growth because of psychological biases.

A fixed supply demurrage currency (negative interest) that is deflationary could in principle work just as well as one that does price level targeting however, the need to adjust prices would remain which is undesirable because we suffer from money illusion.

So no, monetary policy is not what is causing inflation. Inflation is a backwards way of representing an increase in entropy. By that I mean the exponential x% creeping monetary inflation. A supply shock can obviously cause an arbitrary amount of inflation within an arbitrary time span.




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