Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Quick Inflation tutorial - 1

Inflation:
Symptom - Rising prices ( usually this is considered as cause )
Cause - increase of money supply in market
Consequences of Inflation - Dont tell me u dont know yet!!
Worst case scenario - Hyperinflation

Increase in price of a certain good can happen in any of the following cases:
  1. Increasing the supply of money

  2. A decrease in the supply of goods and services

  3. An increase in demand, i.e. population increase

The last two cases will result in increase of a particular good and not general price levels in the market.
What is generally explained by authorities as cause for inflation could be any or a combination of below listed reasons:
  1. Cost-push inflation as a result of arbitrary demands of labor unions.

  2. Profit-push inflation resulting from the greed of businesses raising prices.

  3. Crisis-driven inflation resulting from acts of nature or weather.


These reasons are said to account for a large rise in the general price level (not just a relative rise in some prices, such as the price of oil), the economy’s output must shrink by a large percentage. In practice, “supply shock” cases are seldom large enough to account for much inflation and are typically short-lived. For example, of the 9.2 percent U.S. inflation rate in 1980 (as measured by the GDP deflator, gP = 9.2 percent), the negative growth of real GDP (due, in part, to the OPEC oil price shock of 1979–1980) accounted for only 0.2 percentage points (gy = −0.2%). [Source]

Inflation
is an increase in the quantity of money and credit relative to available goods resulting in a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level, an increase in the quantity of money caused by government.

I will deal
how it happens in later post.

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