[gnaritas]

The price of gold is not a measure of inflation.

Banks don't get most of the money they loan from deposits, they create it from fractional reserve banking via the money multiplier.

Continual low inflation is good for the economy, it encourages spending and investment and discourages hoarding cash. The purpose of money is not as a store of value, but as an enabler of economic exchange. If you want to store value, invest in assets of some sort. Money is not meant for saving, people with money know this, it's why they don't keep their fortunes liquid.

[ekianjo]

> they create it from fractional reserve banking via the money multiplier.

Yes, but they need cash in the first place in order to use the "multiplier" defined by regulators. They cannot create money ad vitam eternam without cash deposits. When there is a crisis, a bank low on real cash value will go bankrupt very easily. Have you already forgotten?

[gnaritas]

Was there a point in stating the obvious?

[ekianjo]

You tell me. By the way, you still have not explained why a zero inflation is not preferable to some low inflation. You said:

"it encourages spending and investment and discourages hoarding cash."

But inflation discourages savings (as I said, critical for the banking system, and therfore impacting investment), and hoarding cash would be anyway discouraged in case you have zero inflation, because you would be able to place your money in portfolio to gain more than 0 on yearly returns (dividends at least). So there would be no net return in hoarding cash. Or are you saying you need inflation to have growth ? In that case you would be mistaken, there was ample growth even when the markets were following the Gold standards...

So I am not really sure where you come from to recommend "low inflation". Besides, who can ensure the inflation remains low, and who can control that there is no dumping of cash on the market when there is a central bank in charge, serving the current political agenda ?

Again, what's good with Bitcoin and Gold is that they are both neutral and relatively free of political control (well, at least for Bitcoin).

[dllthomas]

Don't conflate "zero growth of the money supply" with "zero inflation". Unless the population and amount of goods and services produced stays constant, these two won't correspond. With zero growth of the money supply, a growing population with a growing economy will experience deflation, which is what worries me.

[nunb]

Why does deflation worry you? It's a good thing.

I would like my healthcare to get cheaper and better over time just as my Android phone does.

> Don't conflate "zero growth of the money supply" with "zero inflation".

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, according to Milton Friedman.

[gnaritas]

> Why does deflation worry you? It's a good thing.

You haven't actually studied modern economics if you don't understand why deflation is worrisome and why the monetary policy we have now exists to prevent deflation to achieve this stability: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/US_Histor....

[gnaritas]

It really seems to me you haven't studied economics at all. Zero inflation/deflation would be great, but it's simply not achievable in practice, the economy is not fixed in size. To maintain zero inflation/deflation would require the money supply to fluctuate at exactly the same rate as the wealth in the economy it represents, can't be done.

Inflation is not a measure of just the money supply, it's a measure of the size of the money supply to the size of wealth in the market, fixing the size of the money does not fix the size of the wealth it represents.

Wealth expands and contracts constantly and if the supply of money doesn't change accordingly you get either inflation or deflation. Well it turns out that doesn't work so well, the economy reacts much better and quicker to inflation than to deflation because prices rise easier than they fall. While on the gold standard the swings in the market were wild and depressions happened often.

Fiat money fixed that by allowing the supply of money to be managed to match the need for money in the economy. Money is just a tool after all, it is not wealth, just a means of trading wealth. By continually slightly inflating the money supply, the natural swing from inflation to deflation was pushed over to the inflation side avoiding deflation and all its ills. Since fiat money took over the economy became much more stable and those cyclical depressions under gold became cyclical recessions. Inflationary policy with fiat money simply works better.

Inflation does not discourage saving, it discourages saving cash, big difference that you keep ignoring. Bitcoin is doomed as a currency for the same reason gold died, it's vulnerable to continual and inevitable deflationary pressure. Every sudden jump in real wealth in the market will force bit coin into a deflationary period; this is very bad. It dries up the money supply and encourages hoarding of the tool meant for exchanging. Money is not wealth, it is not meant for saving, it's meant for spending. Treating it like wealth, and hoarding it, reduces the supply that's necessary to keep liquidity in the market and forces traders to trade with lesser amounts forcing suppliers to reduce prices, aka deflation.

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. If the money supply cannot be rapidly expanded to meet the needs of increased wealth being created in the market, then the currency will suffer deflation and fail as a currency. There a reason the nations of the world have moved to fiat currencies, they simply make better more functional currencies.