Krugman and Blanchard are missing the enormous elephant in the room, which is our insane level of debt and money-printing.   People in Turkey, many Latin American countries, and other high-inflation countries understand clearly and viscerally that excessive money-printing by their governments directly causes inflation.   Inflation is an erosion of the value of one’s money/currency, such that everyone becomes more impoverished by their money’s reduced purchasing power.   A $5 loaf of bread yesterday costs $10 today—I.e., you just lost half of your wealth.   In those countries, sometimes money-printing is the only way forward, say, for example to meet government debt obligations in “hard” currencies (like USD or EUR).  For Americans, we have been money-printing far beyond our means, mostly for our inefficient military, but also for corporate bailouts and, more recently, for Covid payouts—all of which economists unanimously agree have no economic benefit to us as Americans.  Over the last two years of approximately ten percent inflation each, we have all become about twenty percent poorer—we lost twenty percent of our purchasing power.   While Krugman makes possibly a valid argument that corporate greed drives inflation, that is a micro-speck of a factor compared to the massive effect of our out-of-control money-printing.   Even Turkish and Argentinian school children understand this clearly.

Krugman and Blanchard are missing the enormous elephant in the room, which is our insane level of debt and money-printing.   People in Turkey, many Latin American countries, and other high-inflation countries understand clearly and viscerally that excessive money-printing by their governments directly causes inflation.   Inflation is an erosion of the value of one’s money/currency, such that everyone becomes more impoverished by their money’s reduced purchasing power.   A $5 loaf of bread yesterday costs $10 today—I.e., you just lost half of your wealth.   In those countries, sometimes money-printing is the only way forward, say, for example to meet government debt obligations in “hard” currencies (like USD or EUR).  For Americans, we have been money-printing far beyond our means, mostly for our inefficient military, but also for corporate bailouts and, more recently, for Covid payouts—all of which economists unanimously agree have no economic benefit to us as Americans.  Over the last two years of approximately ten percent inflation each, we have all become about twenty percent poorer—we lost twenty percent of our purchasing power.   While Krugman makes possibly a valid argument that corporate greed drives inflation, that is a micro-speck of a factor compared to the massive effect of our out-of-control money-printing.   Even Turkish and Argentinian school children understand this clearly.

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