oyarde
Member

QED Alls I'm sayin'. The Fed disburses hella lots of money after conjuring it up from out of nowhere. Everyone already knows this. Knowing that it was precisely X amount here then, and exactly Y amount there when. and so forth, is not going to substantively change anyone's analysis or conclusions with regard to the issue of monetary inflation and its consequences.

I doubt an audit would reveal much in the way of precise and direct one-to-one "coincidences" between Fed disbursements and rising prices (as specified by CPI, etc.). For one thing, Cantillon effects do not propagate at fixed or formulaic rates. One disbursement may have pronounced and near-immediate effects, while another may have more subtle and delayed effects (e.g., see the reference to the Murphy-Henderson bet, below). For another thing, there is a variety of factors other than monetary inflation that induce price changes - so even if a clear correlation could be established from the data, the Fed's defenders would simply attribute the phenomenon to the interplay of other things. And then there's the fact that reference points such as CPI are politically engineered to look more favorable (or less unfavorable) by arbitrarily fudging the numbers - for example, via the exclusion of the prices of certain goods (such as food and energy) from, or the inclusion of mystically counterfactual "hedonics" factors in, such calculations. Recall that Bob Murphy lost a bet with David Henderson over the induction of price inflation after the Fed had massively increased the balances of member banks. Bob had expected all that money to be injected into general currency by the banks, but instead, they held on to a lot of it as reserves - with the result that Bob's empirical prediction of double-digit inflation missed it mark.