A very interesting piece from SocGen‘s Dylan Grice, who talks about monetary easing by the world’s central banks.
Readers who have missed it can read a summary of the salient points at Zerohedge.
“As we have mentioned in the past, Grice appears to be a ‘closet Austrian’. He regularly advocates Austrian ideas and viewpoints, but we have never seen him identify them as such. Be that as it may, it is the ideas that count, not their label. It should perhaps also be pointed out in this context that people like Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard did not see themselves as ‘Austrian’ economists either – rather they felt they were simply economists advancing the science of economics – albeit economists whose work was certainly firmly rooted in the subjectivist tradition of the Austrian school.
To return to Grice, he makes several important points that are well worth considering. For one thing he points out that the institution of money is extremely important to social cooperation. In order for the market economy to function, one must trust a great many people one doesn’t know. Money is the means by which this trust is established: we can assign value to the goods and services offered to us by others in monetary terms. They in turn can do the same with thew things we offer them.
It follows that when money is debased, social cooperation is hampered. There is even more to this in fact: the fiat money system, which has become such an indispensable feature of the modern-day welfare-warfare State, severely erodes peoples moral values. This is because it enables the belief that one can get something for nothing to become ever more entrenched.
The ‘spontaneous order’ of the market economy depends on the ability of economic actors to calculate and to receive proper price signals. Sound money is thus an indispensable feature of a healthy market economy”.
Read the full article here
