A point Milton Friedman once made, and accepted even by many of his detractors, is that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon".
Let's see, what did he leave out?? Population pressures, declining soil fertility, peak oil, dying fisheries, depleted aquifers, and about one hundred other real-world phenomena. "Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"
Of course, with our current banking system, money creation can be driven itself by economic activity and reactions to endogenous shocks. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
And Milton Friedman's description of monetary institutions was based on a fictitious history and rigged econometrics ... and econometrics itself is rigged to allow so many contradictions to observed cause and effect to slide that if you have to rig the econometrics to get "good results", you know that the model is seriously bad.
Of course, the rigging of the econometrics was not Uncle Miltie's fault ... it was all an overzealous graduate student. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
