See, checking percentage money supply growth:
bog.frb.fed.us
Looks like your option #3 is being added to endemic option #4 for the United States.
It looks to me as if the US Fed is doing in advance what Japan has refused to do for several years, and that Japan is doing much as the United States did in the early 1930s.
This may mean a good deal of inflation is coming in the next five years, except that as long as "emerging" countries continue to give us their products so cheaply, goods, at least, will not inflate in price.
If you want to find out where inflation has occurred on a gigantic scale in the United states, just pay the bills for a student at a good private college. My daughter transferred from a state school to Oberlin, and the total bill for her last three years will approach $100,000. So services of a specialized kind may well be the locus of domestic inflation.
It looks as if the Japanese have reverted (understandably, I think) to a form of cultural protectionism--a reluctance to import from the outside--which now expresses itself economically. This is not to condemn Japan. Maybe if they had not been "opened up" in the past century we would not have had the Pacific version of World War II.
Maybe we should give a lot more attention to China.
I wonder if--without anyone saying it openly or even thinking it consciously--the United States is initiating a program of inflating its way out of its huge debt. The money supply figures suggest that. |
