r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 8h ago

Meme needing explanation Petah?

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u/SuspiciousSnotling 8h ago

Deflation is worse than inflation.

It means price can't go up anymore because ppl can't afford, businesses need to slack ppl off to stay afloat, which make ppl poorer and even less capable of buying stuff.

It's a death spiral

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u/PuzzleheadedFee6943 7h ago

why not just start printing money then?!

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u/Classy_Maggot 7h ago

Germany tried that once. There's a reason the Weimar Republic lasted for about a decade

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u/samrus 6h ago

but they werent trying to curb deflation, they printed more money to pay debts to other countries. i imagine if we are trying to curb deflation then we'd increase the monetary supply by a calculated amount to not increase inflation too much

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u/wazeltov 2h ago

This concept is called quantitative easing (QE) and it doesn't always work. Though notably, it did work in '08 after the Great Recession.

Deflation cause people to be afraid of spending money because aggregate demand is much lower. It's certainly possible that QE doesn't fix consumer spending habits. Money is typically not given to people directly because that may cause separate issues. For example, some of the COVID era inflation was due to people receiving money directly from the government, which signaled to businesses that excess capital could get soaked up with price increases.

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u/Own_Policy8854 5h ago

We print money and inject it into the economy all the time. But wealthy people have made sure that they're the ones who get the injections. If the money we printed was, say, given to schools and used to build roads, we would have a more just society.