Raddoppio = stabilita'?!?

Caroline Baum , commentatrice di Bloomberg, ricorda come una inflazione del 2% all'anno non equivalga assolutamente alla stabilita' dei prezzi , nel lungo periodo:

This Is Price Stability? Check Back in 20 Years:
Given all the talk about price stability these last few years, I bet you'd be surprised to learn that the price level in the U.S. has doubled in a little more than 20 years.

I sure was. Perusing last week's report on the Consumer Price Index for September, I was struck by an entry at the very bottom of Table 1 that, I'm embarrassed to say, I'd never noticed before: ``Purchasing power of the consumer dollar (1982- 84=$1.00).''

I followed the dotted line across the page to the figure in the column for the September 2005 unadjusted index, which read $.503. In other words, the dollar today buys half of what it bought in the early 1980s.

Granted, price stability hasn't been part of the central bank playbook for the last two decades. Back in the 1980s, inflation had yet to be reduced to a level where it was no longer a factor in business or consumer decision-making, which is the Federal Reserve's working definition of price stability.

Annual inflation was running at 8.4 percent at the start of 1982, falling to 3.9 percent by the end of 1984, the base period the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses for comparison.

Still, the realization that the dollar buys only half as much today as it did in 1982-1984 made me think about how 2 percent inflation, which is well within the Fed's comfort zone using the CPI, would play out over time.

If the CPI averaged 2 percent a year for the next 20 years, the price level would rise 48.6 percent. In 35 years, it would double. ...So what looks like price stability in the short run is hardly price stability in the long run.

Aggiungo anche che in una prospettiva storica, non possiamo aspettarci un aumento continuo dei prezzi, anche se esistono altri esempi di inflazioni e deflazioni prolungate; non essiste invece una relazione positiva fra livello di vita e livello dei prezzi: in generale, al contrario, la volatilita' nel livello dei prezzi e' generalmente un freno allo sviluppo, o almeno un segnale di problemi sottostanti