Well I think both of you are right. Inflation starts as a monetary phenomenon but it's net effects are not always monetary. Inflation is a policy choice, not a 'feature of the universe'.
It's sort of a policy choice. But, I think money creation and fiat currency is poorly understood.
Even in a metal backed currency world, you still have money creation through lending. Money creation is a feature of lending, not just fiat currency printing. But in that world, currency value is fixed via metal redemption. So, the amount of money in an economy will still expand to 5-20 times the amount of metal, with the specific amount varying as lending expand and contracts. IMO, this makes "hard" currency more unstable than fiat currency in developed countries. Bank runs are less of a problem.
In terms of me and Milton… he’s the nobel prize winning economist and I’m a forum commenter. I just defined my own “inflation,” I’m calling it microeconomic inflation until someone who knows a different name for it says otherwise.
I'm basically saying is that money is not just money, it's not as fungible as it seems. Money supply is basically determined by lending. More loans, more money. In practice, lending is earmarked. So, we have multiple money types. Mortgage supply = housing money, student loans = college money. So, we end up with multiple types of money. Money supply can go up in certain markets, so inflation is uneven.
you do still have money creation through lending but i think that risk tolerance is a limited resource and has a fixed upper limit. If you are too tolerant of risk, your assets will snap back during a business cycle or war or solar flare or asteroid strike or whatever, and the money muliplier will regress to the steady state average.
