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by rank0 1956 days ago
That's very interesting I was not familiar with the concept of velocity.

It still seems to me that velocity can vary depending on the underlying entity. So unless every asset has the same velocity measure as the items in the CPI basket, it seems that there has to be some amount of inflation somewhere like possibly US equities.

1 comments

The idea of velocity is pretty simple. If you print a $1T coin and hand it to me, then I throw it in a safe and forget the code, did the increase in supply cause any material increase in inflation experienced at the point of sale by the average person? Probably not. The supply went up, but the average velocity went down commensurately.

How this interacts with assets is in my opinion not super clear. Pricing of assets is supply and demand, unlike the CPI basket. The CPI basket is based on human need. There's no human need for AAPL shares. However, there's a ton of stimulus money, and folks who remember 2008's V-shaped recovery, and a bunch of people stuck at home day trading. I think that's much more likely to be driving asset prices than supply. After all supply is enacted by changing lending parameters.

To the extent asset prices don't put pressure on CPI, they reflect an increase in welfare, not an increase in inflation.

The velocity of a particular Bitcoin arrives at 0 given enough time. Bitcoin get lost. These Bitcoin cannot move and thus contribute to the deflation of Bitcoin. They effectively shrink the money supply.
True, but that's a uniquely Bitcoin problem, and it's one of the many reasons Bitcoin is not fit for purpose.