Most people associate ‘inflation’ with rising prices, but the disease goes much deeper than that. Inflation is a phenomenon wherein money becomes so abundant it disrupts relative price formation and hence interferes with the vital transmission of information about the state of the countless interactions of supply and demand, plenty and scarcity, which take place on the market. As the fever rises, mistakes accumulate, conflicts intensify, timings clash, finances become stretched, and coherence is lost. A rising price is one thing. Prices -plural- rising at varying speeds and in an ever less predictable manner is a much more dangerous pathology.
Category Archives: Entrepreneur
A recent Wall St Journal article gave vent to a scare-story full of Underconsumptionist claptrap, carried under the catchy headline: “The Coronavirus Savings Glut”. Ironically, and only a day later, the paper ran a second piece entitled “How Coronavirus Upended a Trillion-Dollar Corporate Borrowing Binge and Kicked Off a Wave of Bankruptcies
A recent, long post on Linked-In relates the story of how an attempt to set up a business recycling aluminium cans in the city of Toulouse in France failed for reasons of cost, lack of customer appetite, and ultimately out of the sheer technical impossibility of achieving the desired 100% ‘Green Loop’ for which the enterprise – La Boucle Verte’- was named.
In the drive to prevent (viral) death by means of mass (economic) suicide, our Overlords have begun to order the cessation of activities in all ‘non-essential’ businesses.
While one can sympathise with the sentiment, it is, sadly, yet another example of the ignorant doing harm by trying to do good, since it shows absolutely no understanding of the complexity of the modern economy or of the elevated degree of interdependency which exists within it.
As promised, in this episode of Cantillon Effects, I have considered in much more detail whether there is such a thing as a ‘Consumer’ in isolation? I ask if a person’s role as producer is not more important. I look at the part played by interest rates, capital, and entrepreneurs, as well as by the […]
I’ve entitled this episode of Cantillon Effects, ‘Duck Hunting’, not because I have any sudden urge to blast waterfowl out of the sky, but because a number of economic canards clearly need shooting down before they can find a safe place to roost in the general consciousness and there begin to breed even more confusion […]
There are signs that not only is money beginning to circulate more rapidly through cash registers everywhere, but that Corporate America is beginning to make good some of its recent, much-cited lack of physical investment and, conversely, is starting to eschew some of its contemporary over-indulgence in financial engineering. It may be early days to […]
As world stock markets have continued to climb to cyclical – if not all-time – highs, it has become almost the norm for industry Talking Heads to season their smatterings of media insight with a brief, talismanic expression of scepticism, uttered partly to appease the ever-jealous God of the Markets but mainly so as to […]
SUMMARY: Thanks to the election of President Trump and to his uncompromising attitude to the establishment media, much hot air is being expended on the subject of ‘fake news’. What we should really be getting worked up about is ‘fake economics’, for this is a much more pervasive evil, as well as a much more […]
At the start of the year it has become wearily traditional for us pundits to offer one of two genres of prediction. The first takes the form of a genuine—if ultimately foredoomed—attempt to lift a ragged corner of those thick shrouds of unknowability which separate today from tomorrow. The second combines such futility with a […]
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