Friday, August 12, 2011

Flying Pigs: David Frum's "Forum" takes on the Fed's inflation hawks and looks to Sweden's Central Bank for sensible economic priorities and policies

This commentary may seem like pretty nerdy econ-speak, but it's well worth wading through - both for the confirmation that the inflation hawks on the Federal Reserve "aren't even wrong" - in that their preoccupations are nonsense issues in the current economic climate - and the (welcome!) spectacle of neo-conservative "wunderkind" David Frum  (whose hair is on fire at this very moment regarding the descent into near-total idiocy of his GOP confreres) giving apparent blessing to lessons that might be learned from macro-economic policies in the "socialist hell-hole" of Sweden. The post at "FrumForum" is entitled - accurately - Fed Hawks Turn on the Unemployed:

Inflation isn't always evil

The Good Old Days!
"Welcome Inflation Now?" A prominent economist says yes - "a once-in-75-year crisis calls for outside-the-box measures." 

In our current debt-induced economic straits a higher inflation target will help solve some of the intractable problems of too many people owing too much money on undervalued assets:
In a column in The Financial Times this week, Ken Rogoff, the Harvard economist, suggested central bankers consider “the option of trying to achieve some modest deleveraging through moderate inflation of, say, 4 to 6 percent for several years.”

Mr. Rogoff conceded that “any inflation above 2 percent may seem anathema to those who still remember the anti-inflation wars of the 1970s and 1980s.”...