 Mark Thornton has a special offer for fans of minor issues, a free copy of Murray Rothbard's famous work, Anatomy of the State. This is a limited time offer, so act fast. Get yours today at Mises.org slash Issues Free. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Inflation. What is it? Where is it going? And how will it impact our lives in 2024? Well, the definition of inflation historically and within the Austrian school is an artificial rise in the supply of money by government or central banks by a fractional reserve banking system. Yes, of course, this theoretical definition does expect prices to rise, but how prices will rise or when or what prices will rise the most, we have less to say about, but we do have something to say. Mainstream economics takes a very statistical point of view. They view inflation simply as the increase in prices or more specifically the increase in the price level, such as measured by the consumer price index. With respect to the causes of this overall increase in prices, mainstream analysis in the public eye remains very mute, crickets in other words. And that's basically what you would hear in the media. They never talk about the cause. They're really only talking about the effect in their definition. With respect to their definition of a statistical rise in the overall level of prices and the consequent falling of the value of our monetary unit, the dollar, their view is that this inflation, especially at the Fed, would be transitory. In other words, it was only going to be here for a short period of time and then it would vanish. And then, of course, we heard once that myth was dispelled, then we started hearing about the Fed, the central bank, keeping interest rates higher for longer. And this was designed to reduce our expectations of higher prices politically and economically. And ever since, they've been telling a story that inflation is down, down, down, and that rate cuts are on the way. My view, as I've expressed on this podcast on many episodes, is that empirical things are hard to predict with any kind of precision and that economic charts tend to be very squirrely or squiggly lines rather than straight lines up and down or sideways at an angle. It's only when you get to long-run trend lines that things seem to straighten out, especially with a lot of government intervention in the economy. We've also expressed that consumer price index inflation is not dead. Even the government statistics indicates that it's still very high, relative to expectation and policy goals. Some of these statistics have been fairly stable. And in more recent times, they're actually ticking upward in the United States, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. In contrast to the mainstream view that interest rates have been high lately in response to this inflation, we've suggested that interest rates really aren't that high. They're only high or higher than they used to be when the Fed policy rate was zero, corporations could borrow it 2 percent, and 30-year fixed mortgages were at 3.5 percent, all historically way out of line with any past experience. And also, we've expressed that interest rates are not high enough to kill off inflation, or necessarily even to get back to 2 percent inflation. We've also suggested that the Fed has been using other means than their traditional policies to keep a lot of liquidity in the system. And then, of course, there's the Fed pivot. The Fed pivot was when they talked about lowering interest rates. They were talking about a bond market that had seen rates rise very significantly, had scared financial markets and bond markets and credit markets, and essentially was trying to talk down markets, and it succeeded in doing so. We described it as a fire extinguisher to address the problem, but I don't think it actually put out the fire. Michael Oliver is actually called what we saw in the bond market last year a nuclear event. So if he's right and I'm right, we got a fire extinguisher trying to address a nuclear event. At the same time, the global economy and the U.S. economy are sinking, not doing well, pushing towards recession in many, many countries, including China. And then, of course, 2024 holds a lot of political ramifications as 50 percent of the developed world economy voters go to the polls. A lot of uncertainty there, especially for certain political elites, given the widespread rise of right-wing populism in many countries around the world. Now, with a proper understanding of what right-wing populism is rather than the mainstream media view, this is actually probably a good thing, but it is something that the worldwide elites who are socialist and globalist plus environmentalists should fear. So in some, we don't think that their kind of inflation is dead. And as a matter of fact, unfortunately, we don't think our kind of theoretical inflation as an increase in the money supply is dead or even off the boards going into the future. So what this brings for the Fed and central banks and what that brings for you and me is still a giant question mark for the year 2024.