Saturday, May 30, 2009

Inflation?

I am not an economist. However, I'd guess that I can get some ballpark estimates from first principle considerations.

There are several definitions of the money supply: M1, M2, M3. The government apparently doesn't release M3 statistics anymore, but from the Wikipedia article I gather it is the largest one, and one site professes to be able to recalculate it. Their number is between 10 and 15 trillion dollars, which is consistent with the Wikipedia graph. I'll take the largest number as the most conservative estimate for my purposes.

The incremental debt is of order 1.9 trillion dollars (CBO estimate). Since there is an increase in money but no corresponding increase in productivity (in fact there's a decline, but I'll ignore that), that represents a 13% increase in the ratio of money to goods and services, which I interpret as 13% inflation. The CBO average estimate for the next 10 years, ignoring additional spending for nationalized health (which will not provide significant savings and thus may be legitimately considered extra expense), that represents an average of 10% inflation per year for the next decade. An ordinary savings account with 5% interest will lose 40% of its value. The CBO numbers assume that the currently huge deficit will be reduced over the next few years, but that requires a political vision and courage not often found in DC (or pretty much other government). In that case, with a 13% inflation rate, the representative savings account loses more than half its value.

I don't have a good handle on the cumulative effect of these deficits: it seems plausible that the effect of new deficits adds to the previous year's inflation. If this were linear the result would be 100% inflation by 2019, but I suspect my simple models isn't very good for more than a few years.

In any event, existing bonds earning less than inflation should lose value in a big hurry.

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