ANALYSIS | There's something worse than inflation, and it's on the radar for next year
frostbiker @ frostbiker @lemmy.ca Posts 0Comments 207Joined 2 yr. ago
frostbiker @ frostbiker @lemmy.ca
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Are you saying that a 2%-ish deflation rate sustained for ten years would be catastrophic, but a return to 2019 prices would be a good thing? On what sort of time period would that be beneficial?
Because the accumulated inflation since 2019 is somewhere around 20%, and if we correct it over ten years that would approximately match the scenario you deemed as catastrophic earlier.
Well, that is what Japan tried to do and it wasn't enough. The problem is that in the real world you can't lower interest rates beyond a certain point, because as interest rates approach zero or even negative values (ZIRP), banks find it very difficult to make a profit from lending, which leads them to bankrupcy, which in turn slows the economy down, which is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve. Not to mention that on the way to ZIRP private debt balloons and when interest rates eventually revert to their mean the debt burden becomes unbearable, which leads to a recession.
In other words, macroeconomics is a tricky unstable system and simplistic takes have poor outcomes.