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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

> 7% is higher than we would like, but if the alternative is to have shrinking GDP and massive unemployment, I would rather have some inflation.

The alternative is to have typical 2-3% of inflation and correspondingly the typical 2-3% of GDP growth with healthy labor market. The 7% inflation does get you that 7% GDP growth we're seeing and red hot labor market, yet it is just a temporary effect, like a shot of stimulant, which will soon produce a very heavy hangover.

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I'm not sure this is true - the base case seems to be the Eurozone, the countries of which intervened in their economies enough to forestall a depression, but not to the extent that the US did. Eurozone inflation is just a notch above 5%, unemployment rate right about 7%. In the US it's 7% and 4% respectively. In effect, the US traded a ~2% rise in yearly inflation for a ~3% reduction in unemployment. Reasonable people can disagree on whether that was a good trade, but to say that we could have just "skipped" all the COVID disruptions and maintained low inflation, low unemployment and typical GDP growth strikes me as fantasy land. There wasn't any magical economic policy prescription that would make everything "normal".

Is there a reason you think US money printing, which increases the supply of the world's main currency, is not the cause of at least some non-US inflation?

The suppression of interest rates in the US means it is cheaper to borrow loans in USD right? Those loans are available to foreigners as well. The asset price bubble is international at this point, and with it, the wealth effect leading to sustained levels of demand which would be absent if adequate pricing signals were still allowed to be effective.

If such trade worked then the whole world would have already been practicing it for many decades. Yet what we know from the last 100 years of such attempts is that there is the sweet spot of 2-3% inflation, and deviation from it into either direction is punished.

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