This is Part 2 of a four part article that deals with what I feel is the primary question investors must now answer: is our future to be inflation or deflation? The answer has vast implications to our investment planning and decisions for the near term, and possibly for our long term. It is a very complex question with a lot of moving parts involving economics and politics.
Like it or not, it is economic theory that is driving macroeconomic policies and political decisions that determine whether we will have inflation or deflation. Since not all of my readers are sophisticated traders I have tried to present the issues in a direct and hopefully understandable way. To those sophisticated readers, please bear with me.
Part 2
The Inflation Argument
The argument for inflation rests on the money supply charts. The inflationists show various measures of money supply increasing, including the version used by Austrian theory economists, called True Money Supply (TMS)[1]:
Note: The M1 chart shown in Part 1 more clearly shows the trend in the M1 money supply increase.
Again, the YoY percentage change is more revealing: