Economists Make Their Case For Inflation

Published August 31, 2009, 5:30am ET · 1 min read

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The latest poll by The National Association of Business Economists shows that 41% believe that the Fed’s actions will cause inflation during the next two years. The top reasons cited for concern were “lagged effects of policies now in effect”, “monetization of the debt” and “ineffective exit strategy.” Put another way, the Fed will not be able to get out of its own way as the economy recovers.

The experts who see no way around inflation may be unwilling to admit that the recovery in GDP could be largely jobless. That would mean that the consumer spending that drives most economic growth will not be present and any improvement in the GDP will be muted.

There will probably not be a lot of consumers increasing their demand for goods and services. People who stay employed are likely to save wages or put them toward debt reduction. Inflation cannot thrive in that sort of environment.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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