Excellent Article on Inflation & the Financial Boom

Too many people fall for simple stories of good and evil, to the detriment of economic understanding. Gerard Jackson dispels the myths in Someone Tell Obama: Americans Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis, the World's Central Banks Did. He confronts the Simon Johnson article in The Atlantic which places the blame for the crisis on a sinister cabal of bankers and politicians, and turns our focus to the Federal Reserve. One can't get a full grasp of the article without reading it, but here's an important part:

That Mr Johnson thinks these charts reveal something new and sinister is just a reminder of how ignorant and intellectually narrow-minded journalists can be. Roundabout 1734 Richard Cantillon wrote Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General in which he explained how inflation changes the pattern of production and incomes. The effect of inflation on the financial sector was noted in the French inflation that by 1720 had wrecked the currency. The South Bubble of 1720 was another example.

What we find is that not only do the number of purely financial transactions rise but a number of new financial activities and intermediaries also emerge. It becomes apparent that inflation creates financial imbalances that involve transferring wealth from one group of people to another group at the expense of wealth creation. As these financial dealings expand more labour is demanded. The Wiemar inflation provides a graphic example of this process. From 1913 to the autumn of 1923 the number of bank employees jumped from 100,000 in 1913 to 375,000 in autumn 1923.

An uncomfortable truth for those expecting to print their way out of this crisis.