> It's not just the size of Operation Gutt that is striking to the modern eye. It's also the oddity of the tool being used. Today, we control inflation with changes in interest rates, not changes in the quantity of money. To soften the effect of the global COVID monetary overhang, for instance, central banks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe began to raise rates in 2022 from around 0% to 4-5% in 2024.
It's a bit more interesting than 'the central bank sets interest rates'.
Simplified: the central bank decide on an interest rate that they want to see. By itself that decision doesn't do anything.
What happens next is that they buy and sell government bonds in the open market. The interest rate can be seen as the inverse of the price of bonds.
If the central bank wants to see a lower interest rate, they buy bonds with freshly printed money to drive up their prices, ie drive down the interest rate.
If the central banks wants to increase the prevailing interest rate, they sell government bonds from their inventory and essentially destroy they money they receive in return.
So even when the language of modern central banking talks about interest rates, they still change the quantity of money to implement that.
(This is all simplified, especially with the interest on excess reserves that was popular with the Fed for a while. And there's also repos and reverse repos etc.)
For an international perspective: buying and selling government bonds is far from an universal mechanism for interest rate control (AFAIK when discussing central banks the US is almost always a special case)
For instance the Canadian, UK and European central banks provide systems for interbank short-term loans. It is almost entirely through these systems that they set their target rate.
For Canada the BoC doesn't do any open market operations to reach target interest rate (so almost only repos and reverse repos). Their target rate is in fact called the "target overnight rate" and only concerns overnight lending between Canadian financial institutions.
We don't control inflation with interest rates; we do some economic theatre with interest rates that some people believe controls inflation in a predictable way.
The evidence is very strong that we do actually control it, because in many countries you can see in the historical data when central bank targeting was introduced that the inflation rate drops fairly rapidly into the target band.
It's not a perfect control system because the cost is "NAIRU": non accelerating rate of unemployment. That is, economic growth and wage growth are constrained to avoid a wage-price spiral. And sometimes you get a shock from outside the system.
Please do show this very strong evidence that the effect is any more than the supply chains sorting themselves out. Even some within the CBs are doubting the causality.
Japan had the lowest inflation of any major economy post COVID, and yet persisted with essentially a ZIRP. There's a good argument that in our high reserves world, interest is actually inflationary.
Fascinating piece of financial history I hadn't heard about. Imagine your government telling you to literally take scissors to your money, it's like a weird mix between arts & crafts hour and monetary policy. Though I suppose we're already halfway there with our modern central banks, just without the satisfying snip-snip sounds.
The Finnish experiment failing because people just deposited their cash in banks first is a classic example of Goodhart's Law in action. Or as I like to call it, "If you tell people you're going to cut their money in half, they'll find a way to keep it whole."
What's really interesting is Belgium's more successful approach, they went full scorched earth on 2/3 of their money supply and somehow managed to pull off an economic miracle. Makes our current inflation-fighting tools look rather tame in comparison. "Sorry, best we can do is nudge interest rates up a quarter point at a time.
Turkey dropped six zeroes off their currency in the 2000s.
Technically, you could describe that as cutting 999,9999/1,000,000 of their money supply. (Especially if they had done a funny dance like the Finnish, where you would use some scissors to only keep the tiny top left corner of your old notes, and can exchange that for new ones.)
In practice, people saw the Turkish currency reform as merely a cosmetic change, not an actually reduction in the money supply.
This is one of those measures that hyperinflation countries have to adopt for sanity, re-numbering the money.
The surprising case that worked is the Brazilian "Real": by renaming the currency as well as switching it to semi-controlled exchange rates, inflation was drastically reduced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Real
> Combined with all previous currency changes in the country's history, this reform made the new real equal to 2.75 × 1018 (2.75 quintillion) of Brazil's original réis.
Mentioning the war on COVID but not the actual war between Russia and Ukraine that caused a huge spike in European energy prices is a big omission, since that caused a lot of global inflation.
Extreme hike in energy prices was about four months before the war began.
It’s when EU decided to abandon long term gas contracts and turned to spot prices (~11.2021).
The war started in 02.2022.
In reality that phase of the war started before. Russia did not improvise this war. They started disrupting the supply in 2021 to ensure that Europe would not fill their strategic reserves / winter storage during the summer, thus insuring maximum leverage when they needed it. This is well documented [1]
Note that this is just talking about this phase of the war. Hostilities started in 2014 when parts of Ukraine "suddenly self-liberated" themselves. Helped by mysterious soldiers in professional but unmarked uniforms.
False. Inflation was mainly caused by the central banks(especially the US FED but also the ECB who followed suit) devalued the currency by over-issuing it during the pandemic, not due to the post pandemic high energy prices which are not that high when you adjust for the crazy Inflation the excessive money printing generated.
In short, they barrowed money in your name with you as a guarantor and now you're paying for it, it's that simple.
The war caused by Russia is just a convenient scapegoat that's easier to sell to the financially illiterate population to deflect the blame. Keep in mind most voters don't understand basic economics and how currency supply affects inflation, but they do understand "Russia dropping bombs = bad".
When 80% of the entire world supply of USD (the world reserve currency that the EU also has to use) was printed during the pandemic, how can anyone say that Russia's war caused the inflation? Do people not know arithmetic anymore?
Whole I would also lean towards blaming the US Fed, how can you be so confident in precisely what caused inflation?
One of my big issues with economics as a "science" is that they try to boil down massively complex systems into a handful of numbers. When it comes to global economics and geopolitics the system is even more complex. How would we ever be able to say any particular time of inflation was causes by exclusively, or primarily, any one factor?
At best looking at historic data and seeing graphs that move together show correlation, they will never show causation.
It would be stupid to discount the effect that artificially limiting energy exports and using it for blackmail before and during the full-blown Russian invasion is naive. IIRC my nat gas prices went up like 10x compared to the previous year.
Of course they'd say that. Did you expect them to just say "yeah, we fucked you over by devaluing the currency causing your wages to be worthless"?. Don't be naive please and look into how much currency was issued during the pandemic and see for yourself.
Combine with the fact that Russia and Ukraine are some of the biggest exporters of many critical raw materials, like importantly, foodstuffs (wheat, sunflower oil, etc), and steel, aluminium, oil, gas. Hell, there was a crisis in availability of mustard and snails in France due to the invasion of Ukraine (and on the mustard, a series of bad harvests in Canada which further complicated things).
We can even clearly see it in the inflation charts, first there was growth in energy inflation towards the end of 2021 (as things were ramping back up from Covid), then a big spike in 2022 due to Russia's invasion, and then over 2022-2023, related spike in other sectors: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
To pretend none of this had no impact whatsoever is wilful ignorance.
Bruh, 80% of all USD in existence was issued during the pandemic alone. How the hell can you tell me with a straight face that that didn't cause the inflation? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Read the notes in the link you posted. I don’t think it says what you think it says.
In May 2020, the definition of M1 (monetary supply in “cash”) was changed to include savings deposits. They changed this not due to some conspiracy, but because savings accounts were deregulated to remove withdrawal limits, effectively rendering them cash-equivalent, and thus necessary to include in M1 metrics.
I.e. the 80% spike has nothing to do with money being printed.
Bad faith argument again, or at least terrible tunnel vision.
So what? In the EU a lot of that money went into the Recovery fund, which released the funds in multiple steps (only the first one was in 2021), and a lot of it is still remaining in the fund.
How do you explain the massive inflation in the EU then?
And are you seriously that centred on "money printing" that you cannot imagine gas and oil prices raising multiple times, and the disappearance of multiple critical raw material suppliers, had _no impact whatsoever_?
A recent similar example was the Indian move in 2016 to demonetize the ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes with very little notice, which is in retrospect widely viewed to have been a disaster.
> To our modern sensibilities, this is a wildly invasive policy.
is it? not really
cutting the "value" of money in half always had been a important emergency tool countries had and sometimes used
and "moving" half of the value into a found which even pays out some years later is tbh. quite a fair way to do it (instead of just literally halving the money value permanently)
Without getting political, please, does anyone have a good argument for the expected inflationary pressures of the next year or two? Tariffs will make prices go up, investment in infrastructure will make prices go up… but on the other hand, AI & robotics seems to be a deflationary pressure… where does one go for scenario analysis of the next year or two?
This article scared me a bit with the notion of banks implementing “quantitative freezing.”
You can't really separate these two. If central bank targeting is left alone and the policies implemented aren't too disruptive (i.e. not the wild claims of the campaign), then it won't move much. If some of the wilder claims are implemented, all bets are off.
The article talks about history of alternatives to the interest rates, mainly controlling the currency supply and how it might be implemented in the future. How you discovered price control as the solution in there is still a mystery to me.
I think they are considering the last part of the article to be "price controls". If the government prevents people from buying certain goods by selectivity freezing certain purchases I'm not sure I'd call that a price controls -- more like a prohibition.
But I could see how this could be done similarly more like a price control. If the control was this granular, then maybe car purchases could be limited to $30,000 instead of blocked fully. This is effectively a price control.
Also - the author notes in the comments the post is a prognostication, not endorsement.
That said, much like the original Finnish plan, I have no idea how you'd implement this without massive loopholes. I'd imagine even if there were merits to the policy it would fail on account of the difficulty in implementation.
I wonder if it is more reasonable if there was equally a carrot to go with the stick - something analogous to the bond portion of the Finish approach.
In this context, all European countries including Finland were subject to rationing during the war; the question is about how to phase out both rationing and price controls without having a huge discontinuity at that moment.
Yes, the solution he advocates is "we freeze your assets, allot you a certain basket of consumer goods, and take what we consider the appropriate price out of your frozen assets".
If you'd rather describe that as "communism" than "price controls", feel free.
The theme of the whole piece is that, if you don't allow people to pay more for things, then the price of those things won't rise, and that this is some sort of policy victory. It's a very stupid viewpoint; seeing prices fail to rise because you redenominated the currency means nothing. Seeing prices fail to rise because you prohibit that, on the other hand, doesn't mean nothing - instead, it means your economy is collapsing.
price control would be if they forbid some goods to be paid beyond certain price where the goal is to regulate the distribution of those goods. Currency supply control is a general policy targeted at the total of goods one can pay for in order to maintain the overall economic activity. This is the difference between heating certain rooms in the house and causing global warming.
The post is not a study or a solution or a suggestion or anything of the sort. The author clarified in the last portion that it is a prediction. Someone predicting the bad consequences of the current direction is not advocating for that direction.
The convenience of cutting paper money in half is a really anachronistic element of this tale - I’ve got a fair amount of money saved up, and approximately none of it exists as paper, so much as it exists ‘on paper’ - that is, as figures marked in a bank’s digital ledger, somewhere in a server farm.
That is basically one of the conspiracy theories I have heard related to central bank digital currencies.
As the tale goes, eventually major banks will run into another financial crisis (possibly intentionally if you really like conspiracy theories). The government will say they have no choice but to step in, and their solution will be to open the federal reserve to the public as a government-run bank. All funds lost in the crisis would be covered under an extended FDIC program and the money would be waiting for you in your new Fed bank account, denominated in the newly created CBDC.
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In no way am I vouching for the theory, just sharing it as it is very relates to you question of how it could be handled.
The tricky part isn't money on a digital ledger. That's easy enough to handle with e.g. a one-off deposit tax (IIRC used as recently as the Euro crisis). There's no operational problem here, it just needs to be legislated to happen. Executing the operation properly might take a while (it's not something they'd have a process for), but banks must already have in place systems for e.g. freezing assets which could be used to buy time.
Bonds can just have a haircut on their nominal value, which is pretty much standard operation procedure during a financial bailout.
The real problem is deposits in foreign banks in foreign currencies. In the modern world by the time a country would be looking into this kind of a measure, a lot of the capital will have already fled. In this case the blocker is jurisdiction / sovereignty, not any kind of technical limitation.
It can do; everyone you export to and import from still has the same money with which to buy and sell, and the same goods have different prices than you'd expect from just exchange rates in different markets.
It's a bit more interesting than 'the central bank sets interest rates'.
Simplified: the central bank decide on an interest rate that they want to see. By itself that decision doesn't do anything.
What happens next is that they buy and sell government bonds in the open market. The interest rate can be seen as the inverse of the price of bonds.
If the central bank wants to see a lower interest rate, they buy bonds with freshly printed money to drive up their prices, ie drive down the interest rate.
If the central banks wants to increase the prevailing interest rate, they sell government bonds from their inventory and essentially destroy they money they receive in return.
So even when the language of modern central banking talks about interest rates, they still change the quantity of money to implement that.
(This is all simplified, especially with the interest on excess reserves that was popular with the Fed for a while. And there's also repos and reverse repos etc.)
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