“Faced with rising international food prices,” Steven Mufson writes in the Washington Post, “governments around the world are cooking up measures to protect domestic supplies and keep a lid on prices at home.” Instead of export bans, subsidies, and price controls, governments might better consider the role of their central banks in creating money out of thin air and causing price inflation. Cato senior fellow Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., made that point at the blog ThinkMarkets:
“Prices Soar on Crop Woes” reads the headline in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Global output of key crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat is down, and their prices are up, respectively, 94%, 51% and 80% from June lows. Today’s PPI report has wholesale prices up 1.1% in December after rising 0.8% in November. The Journal reminds us that in 2008 high food prices sparked riots around the world.
Meanwhile Fed officials tell us they don’t expect inflation. It is not an issue of expecting inflation, but of observing it here and now. The Fed prefers, of course, to look at “core” inflation rates, which are much lower. A former Fed colleague explained to me the central bank does so on the theory that people do not need to drive to work and can stop eating.
In our global economy, easy US monetary policy has thus far mainly affected commodity prices (including now food), real-estate in Asia and now broader price measures in Asia. It is implausible that the US would remain unaffected. Food, energy and clothing prices are all rising. I don’t think many households are presently gripped with a fear of deflation.
In the Mises/Hayek theory of economic fluctuations, the transmission of monetary shocks works through producer prices and incomes, and only later consumer prices. No measure of consumer prices, and certainly not a subset of consumer prices, is an adequate gauge of inflation.
(For another take on rising food prices, you can read the views of Paul Krugman and Lester Brown, who say that at last — at last! — we really are running into those “binding resource constraints” that Brown has been predicting for his entire life and that will finally require us to start living at Chinese levels.)
