- If people have more money, they’ll divert some of that money to spending. Retailers will be forced to raise prices, or run out of product.
- Retailers who run out of product will try to replenish it. Producers face the same dilemma of retailers that they will either have to raise prices, or face shortages because they do not have the capacity to create extra product and they cannot find labor at rates which are low enough to justify the extra production.
- The supply of money goes up.
- The supply of goods goes down.
- Demand for money goes down.
- Demand for goods goes up.
This gets us to why drastically increasing the money supply on the surface seems like a good idea. When we say we’d like more money, what we’re really saying is we’d like more wealth. The problem is if we all have more money, collectively we’re not going to be any more wealthy. Increasing the amount of money does nothing to increasing the amount of wealth or more plainly the amount of stuff in the world. Since the same number of people are chasing the same amount of stuff, we cannot on average be wealthier than we were before.
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