大多数经济学家仍然不明白通货膨胀如何摧毁我们的经济

Perhaps it’s just for convenience that most macroeconomics textbooks still teach and discuss monetary and banking policy as if the 2008 and 2020 changes never happened. But when I recently supplemented a classroom discussion with the actual framework, I fell down a rabbit hole so disturbing that Bob Lee Swagger’s horrified line from Shooter, “What kind of sick mind would think of something like this?” (this is the TV version of the original), has been looping in my head ever since.

I knew these changes existed, but I had never fully grasped the perverse incentives they unleashed. Even assuming the best of intentions, the outcomes explain the devastation of Main Street and the staggering concentration of wealth and power on K and Wall Streets.

To understand this perversity, the evolution of modern central banking must be re-examined and retaught. What emerges is a turbo-charged Cantillon effect that drives today’s asset bubbles, crushes inflation-squeezed households, and creates the bizarre disconnect between soaring financial markets and the bleak job prospects facing my brother-in-law and his fellow recent college graduates.

What advocates once promised about government monetary intervention now bears little resemblance to the neutral, stabilizing force still taught in textbooks. To understand why stocks and home prices soar while middle- and lower-income households are crushed by inflation, we must consult the long-dead but brilliant Cantillon. Doing so reveals how Fisher’s equation of exchange misleads by concealing what matters most: who receives the new money first.

The next chart shows this effect intensifying in late 2024. Loans to NDFIs surged 48 percent in just ten months, while real estate lending rose only 1.4 percent and consumer and C&I loans actually declined by 3.1 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.