Saturday, March 08, 2008

How do you thing about this article please which I received from my email? Is this a good way to control inflation? Please give feedback.

Inflation Control
The Bank of Canada's (and most other central banks) overriding PUBLIC mandate today is to control inflation and keep it between one and three percent per year. This mandate takes precedence over any other consideration. This was not the original purpose of our central bank and it is not even a good purpose. In fact, as I will describe later in this section, it is the source of Canada's growing impoverished and homeless population.
More about Price Inflation
We've already covered a simplistic version of how inflating the money supply too much can cause price inflation and now it is time to get a bit more detailed. Extra money does not necessarily translate to higher prices and there are a few reasons for this:
Price inflation can only happen if people have both enough money to pay more for a product and also a desire to own that product. If you don't want something or cannot afford it, you cannot contribute to its rise in price. For example, if nobody in a country wants to buy Brussel Sprout lollipops, it doesn't matter how much the money supply is inflated - its price will not go up because nobody will buy them.
Savings - If everyone in a country was happy with their wages and any extra money they received was saved instead of spent, new money entering the economy would have no chance to affect prices - nobody is spending that money.
Selective introduction of money - If only a certain number of people were receiving the new money and not spending it on the same things as the majority of the population, the majority would notice little or no price inflation because what they are purchasing is not being competed for with all that new money.
The Bank of Canada controls inflation by using the last of the above reasons. It keeps prices down by keeping money away from those products and services that the majority of Canadian's require on a daily basis. Think about this: In the early 1970s a loaf of bread cost roughly 50 cents. Today, it is under $2.00 - less than 4 times the 1970s price. Our money supply has increase 1525% - over fifteen times! If the price of bread had increased at the same rate as our money supply, it should be over $7 a loaf. If we actually live in a true capitalist society, a 1525% increase in money supply would be matched with a 1525% increase in the price of staples such as bread. So how is it that bread has actually gone down in price when compared to the money supply? The answer is both simple and reprehensible.
How many times have you heard something similar to the following: "Unemployment has dropped for the third quarter in a row, prompting speculation that the Bank of Canada (BoC) will raise interest rates to stave off inflation."? Probably hundreds of times - but you never really paid attention to it because you didn't really know what it meant. Well, it means that the BoC felt too many people were working and they needed to throw people out of work. That is an incredible statement and I will say it again in another way:
When too many people are working, it is the job of the central bank to increase unemployment.
People that are not working do not have enough income to bid up prices. In addition, having a large pool of unemployed people that would gladly take your job for less pay than you receive will force wages down, allowing the few people that benefit from an expanding money supply to hoard even more of the newly created credit.
Hard to believe? The proof is announced regularly in the news - listen carefully the next time you hear about the BoC raising interest rates. A generic example would be:
"The unemployment rate dropped for the third quarter in a row to just below 6%, prompting speculation that the Bank of Canada will raise interest rates to stave off inflation".
If that isn't enough for you, then look at the next chart which compares BoC imposed interest rates and unemployment rates.

(data updated Aug 2006)
The BoC has been trying to keep unemployment between 7 and 8 percent since the late 1970s. Follow the interest rate changes since 1995 and you can see the pattern. Following the 1992 depression (it was a depression, but the mainstream media refused to call it one) unemployment was high thanks to high interest rates. Having done its job, the BoC relaxed interest rates to bring unemployment back down to between 7-8%. By mid 1997 it was apparent that unemployment was on its way down so the BoC started hiking interest rates to keep the drop in unemployment at a reasonable (to them) rate. In mid 1999 the target rate of 7.5% was reached so interest rates were raised to stop the drop in unemployment. This worked a bit too well and unemployment went higher than they wanted, so interest rates were again dropped. The World Trade Center attacks happened in 2001 which hurt the markets and so interest rates were dropped to prevent a drastic rise in unemployment. Things went pretty smoothly until 2004 when the target rate of 7.5% was again reached. Since then, unemployment has been declining to the BoC has been raising interest rates to raise unemployment yet again!
In the last year many businessmen have been concerned about the lack of working people hurting their bottom lines and they've been calling on the BoC to ease up a bit on unemployment. It looks like the BoC has acquiesced and is now using a target between 6 and 7 percent unemployment - at least it looks that way, they do not publicly acknowledge their role in maintaining high unemployment so you can only look at trends to see where the actual target rate is.
This manipulation of unemployment is neither new nor is it unique to Canada - it even has a name: Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU for short). You can do an internet search on NAIRU and find all sorts of sites and official papers. Everybody from the US Federal Reserve to the Bank of Canada and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have many paper written discussing this trade off between inflation and unemployment.
So getting back to inflation control. You should, by now, understand that prices can only be bid up if there are people with enough money bidding up the price. By keeping people from earning enough money to bid prices up, the BoC is keeping the price increases on everyday items below the rate of money supply expansion. Working people are getting little of this 1525% increase in money supply but it is not disappearing into the ether - if working folks aren't getting it then that means rich folks must be. This is the source of the ever-widening wealth-gap. Our Bank of Canada is making poor people poorer in order to allow banks to keep inflating our money supply at an alarming rate and make rich people much richer.
This is not the worst of it; the way we calculate unemployment today has extremely important ramifications when combined with an unemployment to combat inflation policy. It forces an ever increasing number of people into unemployment, poverty, and finally homelessness - which will be explained in the next section.