Existe um trade-off entre inflacao e crescimento? Hardly, dizem economistas (book review)

Este livro, cuja resenha apresenta abaixo, nos lembra que a inflação sempre é um fenômeno monetário, ou seja, é provocada pelos governos, como sempre repetia Milton Friedman.
Ele também nos lembra como são insanas essas tentativas de keynesianos de boa cepa (Celso Furtado) e de keynesianos de botequim (quase todos os do atual governo) de tentar obter um pouco mais de crescimento à custa de um "pouquinho" de inflação.
Acabam tendo mais inflação e pouco crescimento.
Robert Barro já tinha alertado que países de inflação baixa acabam crescendo mais, no longo prazo, do que países que toleram taxas mais altas de inflação como pretexto para ter mais emprego no contexto de um crescimento mais acelerado, ainda que à custa de algumas turbulências pelo caminho. Ele lembrava que as crises e recessões provocados por este último modelo não compensavam as altas taxas de crescimento conseguidas episodicamente.
O governo brasileiro pretende ser furtadiano. Eles são apenas inflacionadores...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Published by EH.Net (February 2014)

Brigitte Granville

Remembering Inflation.  

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. xvi + 272 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-14540-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by John H. Wood, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.

Remembering Inflation is principally “a survey of theoretical and applied work by macroeconomists starting in the last third of the twentieth century.  These researchers and thinkers are the heroes of this story.  They advanced the fundamental understanding of inflation by formulating sophisticated analysis and modeling that has cast the most penetrating light ever on its causes, costs, and cures.”  Brigitte Granville is referring to Robert Lucas, Thomas Sargent, and their co-workers, who demonstrated “that widely assumed trade-offs – in particular, between inflation and growth – can be illusory” (pp. ix, xii).

The book was inspired by the view recently expressed by Joseph Stiglitz in “Needed: A New Economic Paradigm,” Financial Times, August 19, 2010: “Bad models lead to bad policy; central banks, for instance, focused on the small economic inefficiencies arising from inflation, to the exclusion of far, far greater inefficiencies arising from dysfunctional financial markets and asset price bubbles.”

Such disparagements “of efforts to bear down on inflation … clearly signaled” to the author “that the time had come for remembering inflation” and its costs.  Granville does not accept the trade-off implied by Stiglitz, instead believing that monetary and financial stability are complements rather than substitutes, and fearing that the “risk of amnesia has been heightened by the early-twenty-first-century experience of boom and bust. … Worries about inflation had in any case long since subsided simply as a result of inflation being brought under reliable control.”  It had begun to be seen as “yesterday’s problem” (p. ix).

Granville lets her heroes make their “case for prioritizing the control of inflation,” which “would improve living standards in the long run [without] material short-term sacrifices” (pp. xi-xii).  Chapter 1, “The End of a Mirage,” surveys economists’ views of money’s effects from Hume to Keynes to the comeback of classical principles and the importance of expectations, of which we were reminded by the stagflation of the 1970s.

The problem of inflation has stemmed from central bank financing of government budget deficits, which brings us to the decisions in many countries after the 1970s to address the problem.  Bringing inflation down can be costly, although there are ways, especially through credible policies, to reduce those costs.

The rest of the book delivers good news and bad news.  The good news is that we understand inflation and how to control it.  Highly publicized structural changes such as globalization or financial developments have not altered the cause or cure of inflation, which has remained always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.  The bad, or at least the tough, news is that the prevention of a recurrence of high inflation requires, in addition to a good memory of its costs, a reversal of society’s acceptance of large government debts.  That is not happening, with the expected results.  Discussions of public debt erosion by raising inflation targets have become popular, and the Fed’s massive balance sheet reveals a presumption that monetary stimulation is worth the risk of inflation.  Déjà vu.

John H. Wood is the author of A History of Central Banking in Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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