MORE DOWNSIDES OF OUR FECKLESS RULING CLASS: Get Ready: A Baleful Consequence of Inflation You’ve Heard Too Little About.

First, I expect to see a substantial surge in labor disputes as real wages (i.e., the relative price of labor) fall when some more flexible prices rise and nominal wages don’t. We are already seeing some indications of that (keep an eye on potential strikes at US ports and railroads).

Second, arguing along Coasean lines, I expect that since inflation makes it costlier to rely on the price system, there will be a substitution towards non-price methods of resource allocation, including vertical integration (in lieu of long term contracts where misalignment of prices leads to costly disputes between the parties), and the rationing mechanisms that Dennis Carlton (another former thesis committee member of yours truly) wrote about in the JLE in 1991. (There might be some shifts in the other direction too. Goods that are somewhat commoditized but are currently exchanged under formal or informal contracts with relatively inflexible prices might be amenable to being traded on auction- or auction-like platforms with more flexible prices.) . . .

Third, contracts will become shorter in duration, and incorporate various indexing clauses (which mitigate, but do not eliminate, relative price distortions).

Fourth, inflation and the associated relative price volatility can be a boon for futures/derivatives markets. It is not a coincidence, comrades, that a major burst of growth in derivatives markets (both in size and scope) occurred at the time of the last major inflationary period.

This list is not exhaustive by any means. It’s just some things that immediately come to mind.

Plus: “As Sherwin forcefully expressed, inflation is anything but economically benign, something that microeconomists (like Sherwin) are sensitive too, but which macroeconomists too often ignore. (Back in the day, macro types thought that the only real cost of inflation was “shoe leather cost” due to people having to walk to the bank more often.)” Morons.