FIBR - This Is Why Monetary Policy Is So Ineffective

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, many people thought excessive government spending and the resulting debt would bring inflation or even hyperinflation.

We wanted a hawkish Federal Reserve or, better yet, a gold standard to prevent it. Reality turned out differently.

Federal debt rose steadily, inflation didn’t. Here’s a chart of the on-budget public debt since 1970:

Source: St. Louis Fed

Here is the same data in terms of debt to GDP:

You can see the debt growth started to level out in the late 1990s but then took off again. Yet the only serious

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