Sunday, December 23, 2007

Monetary Policy Driven Inflation on Horizon

Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture economics blog shows us a rather interesting picture:



The "continuation" bit is there because Federal Reserve under Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan stopped reporting the statistic, saying that it was not a "useful" statistic.

Rolling the Wiki, we get the following:
  • M0: The total of all physical currency, plus accounts at the central bank that can be exchanged for physical currency.
  • M1: M0 + those portions of M0 held as reserves or vault cash + the amount in demand accounts ("checking" or "current" accounts).
  • M2: M1 + most savings accounts, money market accounts, and small denomination time deposits (certificates of deposit of under $100,000).
  • M3: M2 + all other CDs, deposits of eurodollars and repurchase agreements.
So, all the big money transfers and currency injections in the market over the past few months, they are no longer counted by the Fed, but we can see that the overall money supply is increasing at double digit rates over the past year or so.

We've already had nearly a trillion dollars dumped into the credit markets over the past month.

Money is being shoveled out the door to attempt to resolve a liquidity crisis. The problem is that it is an insolvency crisis, though hyper inflation may bail that out.

No comments:

Post a Comment