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3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2025
1:26:04 · 1.5M views · Mar 21, 2016
An 86-minute Milton Friedman talk arguing that inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by money supply growing faster than goods, and that the cure is less government spending and money printing.
Shared during inflation discussions as an accessible, layman-friendly statement of the monetarist view.
4 comments from Hacker News
Milton Friedman - Money and Inflation - this video I think is under rated talk which explains complex stuff in layman terms.
- Militarisation. Countries are spending a lot of defence. - The move towards reverting globalisation(with rising unemployment, countries are looking inwards) - Inflation (this is not going to end in the near future; inflation is the result of quantitative easing that was done multiple times. Here is a good explanation of that: this video ) - Differences among citizens of different countries are becoming prominent (the reason is the same as point #2 above)
I watched this video from Friedman just a couple of days ago and found it insightful on the topic of inflation: this video
This is absurd. An opinion column in the NYT does not constitute an authoritative reference on the matter. Try some Milton Friedman [0] on for size: Now the first step towards understanding the cause of inflation is to recognize that it is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It's always and everywhere a result of too much money - of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. [...] inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else. [...] We have evidence for the United States for over a hundred years; for Great Britain, for two hundred years; for Sweden, for two hundred years. There has never in history been an inflation that was not accompanied by an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money. There has never in history been an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money without an inflation. Or otherwise, "inflation is a printing press phenomenon." There is very clearly a falsifiable hypothesis here: inflation increases if and only if the monetary supply increases. The induction is based on decades of empirical data, and Friedman presents a series of charts to illustrate the correlation. This, to me, sounds at least like an attempt at science - falsifiable hypothesis verified against empirical data, and clearly predicts that inflation will result if the monetary supply is increased. We may quibble over the specifics and the numbers, just as one may quibble over what the exact percentage probability of rain is on a