• Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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    2 hours ago

    Firstly, the value of the dollar decreasing will increase the cost, in dollars, of all imports. The tariffs on top will add to this inflation.

    Yes

    Printing money doesn’t automatically lead to inflation but in a recession environment where less is being produced, it certainly does. The quantitative easing and money printing workdwide, due covid, led to the crazy inflation we saw. Certainly supply was a problem, but a reduction in trade between 2 giant economies is also going to cause those kinds of bottlenecks.

    Disagree on two points. Depending on what the cause of a recession is, printing may or may not produce inflation. If a recession isn’t caused by a shortage of some real resource (e.g. oil) or reduced production capacity (e.g. physical destruction, mass death), printing money while there’s slack in production capacity does not cause inflation, it increases production via increased aggregate demand. The pandemic was a perfect example of having reduced production but no reduction in production capacity. The monetary stimulus kept aggregate demand from collapsing and production rapidly increased close to capacity once we reopened. That leads to the second point of disagreement. A few good analyses I’ve seen on this clocked stimulus at causing up to a quarter of the inflation we saw while the rest was caused by the significant increase in oil prices and corporate price gauging (record profits and all that). The outlets I’ve seen claiming it was mostly due to spending have typically been ideologically driven. Take that as you will. I won’t change my mind on this as I believe I’ve seen enough information on it. No hard feelings. ☺️

    Add loss of faith in the dollar and this multiplies. Trump is destroying the dollars purchasing power which leads to inflation. All the while he’s killing jobs in public sector and private sector at the same time.

    More for some items, less for others. It’s going to increase prices of imported goods as you said in your first point. It won’t increase the prices of domestically produced items. Of course many domestically produced items have imported components. Those that have more are going to go up to more than those that have less. And anywhere in-between. It’s probably impossible to accurately gauge the result but inflation is definitely going to occur as a result of the devaluation of the dollar within the US. With that said, and you’re not gonna like this, Trump would be able to offset that by printing money to increase wages to compensate for that. And that likely won’t cause additional inflation because the production capacity would remain unchanged. In fact he’d have to do it to avoid a decrease in the aggregate demand due to the reduction in real wages from the devaluation. Now I highly doubt his people are competent enough to do this and to do it right, as they could easily over or undershoot. 😂 They might even be ideologically opposed to doing it.

    But don’t get me wrong, on the whole I think it’s going to be a shit show and they won’t be able to pull off what they’re trying to do and the US is gonna go into a dumpster fire stage. From the horribly targetted tariffs and the other damage unrelated to the trade war they’re doing. If anything I’d be losing more confidence in the US because of the latter, since tariffs can be reversed more easily than say the long term effects of destroying education on their labor force among other things.