you're welcome! it's always nice to know that a discussion you're having is informative to someone else.
"The problem that I have is that there is little discussion of what the structure of general commodity relations produced by means of wage labor for the purposes of profit implies for the nature of money and its production." in this respect i think Graeber is a bigger thinker (although i haven't read Ingham's book, only heard good things about it). "Another question I have is whether inflation targeting should be understood as an ersatz commodity money" i don't think so, first inflation targeting doesn't work. just because the central bank says something doesn't make it so. the central bank says that it hopes pigs start flying soon, but i doubt the market will make it happen. interest rates might effect lending patterns at the margin but a rise in interest rates also increases rentier income which, if anything, is slightly inflationary and vice versa. then there's doug henwood's point (circa 1994) that a promise to keep raising interest rates will lead to capital flight since it's a promise of an extended period of capital losses and vice versa. that means that a promise to keep raising interest rates might actually devalue the currency and make commodity prices higher, increasing cost-push inflation (and vice versa)! the mechanism of bank lending that money and banking textbooks push out is complete garbage. maybe if inflation targeting worked the way they said it worked it would be like "ersatz commodity money". link to henwoods comments here:http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/1994m06/msg00114.html these archives are fascinating by the way.... -- -Nathan Tankus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
