Think about this with me. Prices are a signal that indicate relative supply and demand. As demand for something increases, prices go up and/or supply increases. Usually both. Given finite humans on the planet, logically demand is finite, which means there is a finite supply which can be created and sold. Suppliers KNOW this, and further realize that if they incur production costs for things or services which cannot be sold, they lose all their money. You can’t have a yogurt shop on all four corners of an intersection and expect all four to stay in business.
Yet, one must measure this in terms of risk and reward. In conditions of easy money, it costs the entrepreneur none of his own money to open a business, and it costs the bank none of ITS own money, either, since it is in the end creating the money from scratch. Both entities can just invest the money, and if they go belly up, the entrepreneur just files bankruptcy for the corporation he created, and the bank writes the loan off, goes into receivership, or gets bailed out. The individuals involved are never made to suffer any serious consequences, as for example they would if they had had to save up the money involved through long effort (which is how most people envision our system.)
The lack of penalty has serious consequences, as it incents overproduction. We are conditioned to consider inflation as something that can be accurately measured, and which affects economies as a whole. This is not the case. Localized inflation is so common in the modern world as to be almost the rule.
Inflation, to be clear, is in my definition any increase in the money that COULD be circulated. It is not tied directly to price inflation, although of course the two are related.
In the 1920’s inflation happened almost exclusively in the stock market. Prices for homes, cars, and other essentials increased only slowly. This inflation was facilitated by margin buying, which is to say money creation which was a result of fractional reserve banking, and which was supported for a time by low rates at the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (I just realized, by the way, where this term comes from: when you borrow money you are saying “I will give you $105 in the future for $100 today.” You are selling an IOU you paid $105 for for $100. You are discounting the IOU by $5).
This led of course to “irrational exuberance”, and overinvestment. It led to investment which WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN PLACE absent the ability to borrow the money in question. And the crash happened as a direct result of a credit tightening that the Federal Reserve initiated.
The point I want to make is this: overinvestment, which leads to a need for steep discounting, cannot happen absent what I am going to call dumb money entering the economy; and there is no fundamental difference between money which enters the economy as a result of being created as what amounts to fake Monopoly money, and money which enters the economy via government spending projects.
Keynes argued, in effect, that economic downturns were the result of overproduction relative to demand. This is not entirely inaccurate, as for example the initial phase of the Great Depression was the result of the overproduction of MONEY. This created all sorts of miscalculations as to future demand, and resulting overproduction of real goods. Further, since most of the money in circulation had been created by banks, when mass numbers of banks failed, it caused monetary contraction, which caused everything to decrease in price, at a time when oversupply would already have put downward pressure on prices.
However, the result of the government putting money back into the economy would not be anything but a repetition of the basic problem: the temporary overstimulation of some local sector of the economy, at the expense of the economy as a whole. As an example, in a dam project everyone could be paid twice the prevailing local wage for their trade, which would pull those trademen away from otherwise productive work, then when the project finished, the whole local “bubble” would collapse.
In both cases, where the money is NOT flowing is into carefully considered business projects where the originater has skin in the game, where they are incented to CARE about the outcome as a result of actual pain that would attend failure.
The goal in all economic activity is adding INTELLIGENCE to the process. The essence of Capitalism is innovation, which we might summarize as intelligence. That system which pays people to be smart will, logically, over time become better organized and efficient. Our task at present is to remove the idiocies (the incentives that pay people to take foolish risks or to game the system) that are plainly present in our current system.