It's like that

As a follow-up to my two previous posts, I want to clarify one point: There is an imbalance between private and public debt, an excess of private relative to public, and economic growth will not improve until the imbalance is corrected.

My theory doesn't need 2% inflation to prop up the economy. And it certainly doesn't need three or four percent inflation to get better growth. I have no need of that hypothesis.


From Unveiling the Edge of Time by John Gribbin:

Newton himself had been baffled by one feature of the behavior of the planets. One planet on its own, orbiting the Sun, would indeed move in a perfect ellipse in obedience to Kepler's laws, under the influence of the inverse-square law of gravity. But with two or more planets, the extra gravitational forces of the planets acting on each other would tug them out of their Keplerian orbits. Newton feared that these effects might lead to instability, eventually tumbling the planets out of their orbits, and sending them either crashing into the Sun or drifting away into space. He had no scientific answer to the problem but suggested that the hand of God might be required, from time to time, to put the planets back in their proper orbits before such perturbations became too large.

In the mid-1780s, however, Laplace proved that these perturbations are actually self-correcting. Using the example of Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in the Solar System, with the strongest gravitational pulls, he found that although one orbit might contract gradually for many years, in due course it would expand again, producing an oscillation around the pure Keplerian orbit with a period of 929 years. This was one of the foundations of what is possibly the most famous remark ever made by Laplace. When this work on celestial mechanics was published in book form, Napoleon commented to Laplace that he had noticed that there was no mention of God in the book. Laplace replied: "I have no need of that hypothesis."