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by arcticbull 1370 days ago
Can you find any article anywhere which quantifies the magnitude of the Cantillon effect because I certainly have looked and found absolutely nothing.

Crypto is hardly inflation-proof, with major cryptos having fallen 80% or more in the last 6 months putting it on pace with the Lira - if you then adjust it for inflation you lose another 10%. It's somehow managed to do all that in the single most inflationary period in 50+ years. I was pretty sure we'd given up on that silly narrative. Crypto is a high-beta speculative play on US dollar liquidity in the global financial system, not a hedge on inflation.

Wanna save money from inflation? Buy some I-bonds.

So uh, zoom back in ;)

[edit] Also, liquidity per (as defined by the size of the Fed's asset book) se isn't really correlated with asset prices, which is why we're doing interest rates. I recommend listening to the Odd Lots podcast with Kashkari in re: inflation.

1 comments

Honestly, the cantillon effect is a red herring because any form of spending, it doesn't matter if the money is physically printed as a bank note with no debt backing it or simply spent from savings in a gold standard. If you divide the economy into two sectors, your bank account and the rest of the economy, then spending off your bank account will create a net increase in the money supply in the rest of the economy, this will raise prices in close proximity to you. Or in other words, the cantillon effect describes how price signals propagate through the economy. The strange thing is that people have this fixation on "printed" money causing inflation but as I mentioned, the cantillon effect also applies to normal spending of money that was received via taxes. If you ban the "printing" of money as we have already done by establishing central banks the cantillon effect remains.

Where do we find proof of the cantillon effect then? Government spending as a percentage of GDP and subsequent public sector employment but then again, this isn't something new, it is boring and obvious, not some conspiracy of the government scheming against you.