Unwise money-printing will soon lead to inflation

WASHINGTON — Readers might remember that from time to time, I fret about the danger of price inflation due to the frenetic printing of money going on in the world. As a survivor of hyperinflation (Peru, 1980s), I suppose you can't blame me. In any case, symptoms of price inflation have begun to pop up in many countries.

The consumer price index in Britain has officially reached 3.7 percent but many observers think the real figure is above 4 percent, double what the government had forecast. In Europe in general, the annual inflation figure has surpassed what the European Central Bank had targeted. Not to speak of China, where it is almost 5 percent and rising.

Bill Gross, who manages the world's largest bond fund for investment advisers Pimco and whose job is essentially to find debt securities whose yields beat inflation, put it succinctly: "Why would you want to be a bondholder with bond yields so low and that sort of inflationary trend?" Bond investors are simply waiting for a big rise in inflation followed by significant interest rate hikes.

The emerging world has been shaken by exploding food prices. Indonesia has just taken measures to lower the prices of 57 different items after it was reported in December that annual inflation had surpassed 7 percent. Through a combination of tariff reductions and cash transfers to families, Indonesian authorities are trying to pre-empt the kinds of food riots we saw in Asia and Africa a few years ago. Indonesia's central bank is now ready to follow South Korea and Thailand, where interest rates were raised for fear of inflation. India made headlines when it did so too, and Brazil, where a new president came into office pledging to bring about a significant drop in interest rates (her country has by far the highest rates in the emerging world), has just had to increase them.

Several structural imbalances are affecting commodity prices, particularly the growing demand for food in places where the burgeoning middle class is expanding its intake of protein. But a major factor in what is happening is the liquidity disease of our times — "quantitative easing," the artificial creation of money as a way to spur a full economic recovery in the wake of the 2007-08 financial calamity.