An expansion of the supply of money and credit. Rising consumer prices are the consequence, not the definition: when more units of money chase the same goods, each unit buys less. This site uses the older, mechanical meaning because it names the cause.
The vocabulary of inflation
Nineteen terms, defined the way the primary sources define them. Much of the public confusion about inflation lives in the words: when inflation means rising prices, the cause has no name. Most entries link the research note that documents them.
- Inflation
- Purchasing power
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What one unit of money actually buys. The US dollar has lost about 97 percent of its purchasing power since 1913, measured by the BLS consumer price index. A 2026 dollar buys roughly what three cents bought in 1913.
- Fiat money
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Money that is money because the state declares it so, from the Latin fiat, let it be done. It is redeemable in nothing and can be created without limit. Every currency on earth has been fiat since August 15, 1971.
- Gold standard
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A monetary system in which the unit of account is a fixed weight of gold and banknotes are redeemable claims on it. Under the classical gold standard, British consumer prices were lower in 1913 than in 1815. It is the control case against which fiat money can be judged.
- Central bank
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An institution with a legal monopoly on issuing the national currency and setting the price of credit. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the European Central Bank in 1998. Central banks act as lender of last resort to the banking system and, in practice, to the state.
- Fractional reserve banking
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A banking system in which banks hold only a fraction of their deposit liabilities in reserve and lend the rest. In the modern form the order is reversed: the loan creates the deposit. The reserve requirement in the United States has been zero percent since March 26, 2020.
- Money creation
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The process by which new money enters the economy. The Bank of England stated it plainly in 2014: "Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money." Nearly all money in a modern economy consists of bank deposits created exactly this way.
- M2
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A standard measure of the US money supply: currency in circulation, checking and savings deposits, and retail money market funds. M2 grew from 0.69 trillion dollars in 1971 to 22.7 trillion in 2026, a 33 fold expansion. Series M2SL, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
- Consumer price index (CPI)
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The official measure of consumer prices, published in the United States by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The basket, the weights, and the methodology are chosen by the measuring institution, and the methodology has been revised repeatedly since 1980. The knowledgebase documents what those revisions did to the measured rate.
- Cantillon effect
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Whoever receives new money first spends it at old prices; whoever receives it last pays the new prices. Named for Richard Cantillon, who described it around 1730. It is the mechanism by which money creation moves wealth toward asset owners and away from wage earners.
- Hyperinflation
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By Phillip Cagan's standard definition, inflation exceeding 50 percent per month. There are 56 documented episodes in recorded history, and not one happened under a commodity standard. Every one happened in paper or in a credit money the state could expand at will.
- Debt monetisation
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A government finances its deficit by selling bonds that the central bank buys with newly created money. Most central bank statutes forbid buying directly from the treasury; buying the same bonds in the secondary market is routine. Every documented hyperinflation began as deficit finance with new money.
- Quantitative easing (QE)
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Large scale asset purchases by a central bank, paid for with newly created reserves. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet grew from under 1 trillion dollars in early 2008 to nearly 9 trillion at its 2022 peak (series WALCL). The name avoids the word that describes the operation.
- Seigniorage
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The issuer's profit from creating money: the difference between what new money buys and what it costs to produce. Under a fiat system the cost of production is near zero, so the profit is near total. It accrues to whoever creates the money, never to whoever holds it.
- Bretton Woods
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The 1944 agreement that made the US dollar the world's reserve currency, redeemable in gold at 35 dollars per ounce, with the other currencies pegged to the dollar. It ended on August 15, 1971, when the redeemability was suspended.
- Nixon shock
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President Nixon's announcement of August 15, 1971 that the United States would suspend the dollar's convertibility into gold, in his words "temporarily." The suspension was never lifted. Since that day no currency on earth is redeemable in anything.
- The inflation tax
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The transfer of purchasing power from everyone who holds money to whoever creates it. It requires no legislation and appears on no pay slip. Keynes named it in 1919: "By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
- Real wage
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A wage measured in what it buys, not in the currency it is paid in. US productivity and hourly pay rose together until the early 1970s and parted afterwards; the gap is documented in primary data. A rising nominal wage can be a falling real wage.
- Central bank digital currency (CBDC)
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A digital liability of the central bank held directly by citizens. Unlike cash it can be made programmable: expiry dates, category restrictions, and per person rules have all been demonstrated in pilot projects. Whether those features ship is a political decision, not a technical one.