スタグフレーション解明のためのプラクティカルな理論•急性多占

第1次石油危機時のエピソード

抄録

Recently much discussions on rational expectations are made in our profession. A strong warning however is given by Milton Friedman on the danger of inflationary expectations caused by excessive supply of money in the late 1970s. This kind of warning was already given by J. M. Keynes repeatedly in his Economic Consequences of the Peace and A Tract on Monetary Reform. He argues that inflationary expectations paralyze the market and make it the place of gamble lottery. At the very beginning of economics, Adam Smith had recognized that in the phase of extreme excess demand the market competition would take place exclusively among buyers but not among sellers, and consequently the price would increase drastically. This implies that the inflationary expectations will cause extraordinarily high pressure of competition among buyers and extraordinarily low one among sellers. We call the latter situation acute polypoly, and analogously the former acute negative-polyopsony or acute negopsony in short. In late 1973 in Japan we observed a typical consumers' panic caused by the inflationary expectations in the toilet paper market. In collaborating with Ms. Sakiko Tsuzuki, I tried to measure the extent of polypoly and polyopsony which took place in that market applying the concept of elasticities of conjectural market response λ's of sellers and buyers, and we confirmed the validity of our theory.