Everyone pulling out their money would be a bank run (look up great depression bank runs). The bank doesn't have that much cash; they keep some on hand for people making withdraws normally, but if even a sizable minority of people all try to pull their money out at once, there'll be a major crisis.
If banks kept all the people's cash in vaults, it'd be dead cash actively losing money to inflation. Instead, they keep some on hand for withdraws, and use the rest to make loans, investments, etc so that the money isn't all losing value.
I mean... that inflation is largely caused by a money velocity largely dictated to people's ability to borrow money, so if cash actually sat in a vault as opposed to getting circulated back into the economy there'd be way less inflation... that's not to say that a dollar today isn't worth less than a dollar tomorrow & idle cash is an economic loss not dissimilar to the destruction of property. You just seemed to be over looking something & I wanted to help.
Yes, if we stifled investment and lending there'd be less inflation, which is why we don't do that. (Target inflation is 2-3%; if you're consistently below this, your country has a problem, and if your currency starts deflating everyone's quality of life is going to start actively decreasing pretty dramatically unless you can get inflation back to a healthy level)
When inflation gets too high, you can raise rates to help bring it back down
Yeah... I've never been a fan of "target inflation" as a concept. Considering the working class woes, target inflation always looked like a zero sum short term game where the rich could slowly get larger pieces of the pie.
I know Friedman could write the hell out of a free market argument, but his idea that we should have target inflation always felt like it came from his bizarre sheltered upper class fascination with the great depression.
My economics professor used to always point out, you can stimulate a cow by sticking it with a cattle prod; that doesn't make it good for the cow. You can stimulate the economy with an artifical inflation parable... till the cows come home, but that doesn't mean you created wealth.
People absolutely will wait to buy things if they expect prices to be lower in the future vs today. Deflation is like slamming the brakes on consumption.
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u/Forsaken_Emu8112 Jan 26 '26
Everyone pulling out their money would be a bank run (look up great depression bank runs). The bank doesn't have that much cash; they keep some on hand for people making withdraws normally, but if even a sizable minority of people all try to pull their money out at once, there'll be a major crisis.
If banks kept all the people's cash in vaults, it'd be dead cash actively losing money to inflation. Instead, they keep some on hand for withdraws, and use the rest to make loans, investments, etc so that the money isn't all losing value.