The death of inflation (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

Preface This book is primarily addressed, not to my fellow econo-mists, but rather to that much-maligned character, the intelligent general reader. Accordingly, I have tried to avoid jargon, kept theoretical disputes as far as possible in the background, and reduced notes and references to a minimum, confined to the end of the book. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is devoted to the exposition of my thesis, while Part II discusses the consequences for individuals and businesses and for the worlds of property and investment. In Part III, I discuss the historical evidence on inflation and interest rates and the implications of my thesis for economic policy. I have not neglected my fellow economists entirely, for I try to address some of the theoretical issues raised by my ideas in Chapter 8, though again, I have tried to make this accessible to the non-economist. Chapter 8 has caused me some difficulty because of the wide discrepancy of views about the current state of play in theoretical economics. I am sure that it will not find favour in many quarters. Some economists appear to believe that monetarism is dead and there is no need to kick the corpse. But plenty of others still believe that analysing money supply trends is all there is to understanding and forecasting inflation. More importantly, as I have found at the various seminars where I have presented my ideas, even those who would not identify themselves as monetarists tend automatically to think in terms of the monetarist framework when considering the big issues regarding inflation which are the subject of this book. This is probably because without such a framework, in theoretical terms, inflation then seems indeterminate, a prey to assumptions about starting points, historical processes, expectations and institutions. This, though, is precisely my point. Accordingly, I have found it necessary to argue how and why money supply analysis is not the be all and end all of inflation, and how the various real forces which I adduce have their bearing. Going on from historical interpretation to give a radical view of the