Reply To: Cost of living crisis

That Wikipedia entry says that

“the ‘bullion controversy’ gave him fame in the economic community for his theory on inflation in 19th-century England. This theory became known as monetarism, the theory that excess currency leads to inflation.”

I thought that entries in Wikipedia were checked and double checked. Apparently not in this case. Ricardo had nothing to say about inflation in 19th century England. First, he died in 1823. Second, there was no inflation in 19th century Britain:

“From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the start of World War II in 1914, there was no inflation in most countries, and in many cases, prices were lower in 1914 than they had been in 1815. Prices fluctuated up and down from one decade to the next, but overall, prices remained stable.”
(https://globalfinancialdata.com/the-century-of-inflation#:~:text=The%20Nineteenth%20Century,they%20had%20been%20in%201815.)

The reason was that during this period Britain had a paper currency that was convertible on demand into a fixed quantity of gold. This convertibility had been suspended during the Napoleonic wars and Ricardo was one of those in favour of its reintroduction (which happened in 1821) as a way of avoiding the inflation that had occurred during the Napoleonic Wars when there was no such convertibility.