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Comment Re: Heh (Score 1) 96

What if a rational determination of supply and demand is not possible, because arbitrary and capricious individuals use personal power to restrict supply or destroy demand at their whim?

Fischer Black in "Noise":

"Noise in the form of expectations that need not follow rational rules causes inflation to be what it is, at least in the absence of a gold standard or fixed exchange rates. Noise in the form of uncertainty about what relative prices would be with other exchange rates makes us think incorrectly that changes in exchange rates or inflation rates cause changes in trade or investment flows or economic activity. Most generally, noise makes it very difficult to test either practical or academic theories about the way that financial or economic markets work. We are forced to act largely in the dark."

"In my model of the international economy, changing relative prices become noise that makes it difficult to see that demand and supply conditions are largely independent of price levels and exchange rates."

"the slopes of demand and supply curves are so hard to estimate that they are essentially unobservable. Introspection seems as good a method as any in trying to estimate them. One major problem is that no matter how many variables we include in an econometric analysis, there always seem to be potentially important variables that we have omitted, possibly because they too are unobservable."

Comment Re: Pay to play? Piece of the action? (Score 1) 96

How about "Towards An Understanding of the Real Effects and Costs of Inflation" by
Stanley Fischer & Franco Modigliani ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w0... )?

Did these two luminaries of the Economics discipline find anything other than "menu costs" as a downside, and can't that be easily automated away? If you keep track of prices in purchasing power units, will you even notice hyperinflation, if that is the arbitrary outcome of full indexation?

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