The same things that anyone who has a passing familiarity with economics will name. Inflation is a measure of prices, and as with all things price related, supply and demand is well known to be the underlying issue.bobevenson wrote:Let me ask you one simple question: what do you think is the cause of inflation?
Rising wages when employment is high is the classic one. It causes firms to bid up wages (the price for labor) and then they have to either pass on the extra costs to consumers or else profits tumble.
Falling currencies at other times push up the price of imports and acts as a hidden pay cut for the nation, so that tends to poke inflation a little.
Expectations of future interest rate rises pushes up the cost of credit, which plays through into higher prices also.
Increasing prices for raw materials caused by either high demand or long term underinvestment stokes inflation pretty hard so long as it doesn't bust demand.
The technical terms for these effects are demand-pull and cost-push. Your theory completely fails to take them into account. They are both a natural part of an expanding economy. Your hopes of squashing inflation entirely depend on flat-lining your economy while both importing and exporting nothing including goods, money and people.
Inflation through monetary expansion on the other hand is generally only a major part of the mix during collapses of the credit markets (when it is deployed to prevent deflation) or when a woefully mismanaged economy hits a fiscal problem and compensates by a combination of monetary financing and economic repression - as seen in recent decades in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Argentina, and the Greeks would have done it too if they could.
