Question

Passage A
For decades, economic historians attributed the prolonged inflation that swept sixteenth-century Western Europe—the so-called Price Revolution—almost exclusively to the massive influx of American silver following the conquests of the Spanish Empire. Under the classic quantity theory of money, an unprecedented expansion in the circulating volume of precious metals inevitably diluted monetary purchasing power, driving nominal commodity prices upward across European markets. Proponents of this monetarist framework emphasize the striking chronological correlation between registered bullion arrivals at the port of Seville and the broad escalation of commodity prices across the continent. When silver supplies surged, local currencies depreciated relative to basic goods, creating a synchronized continental inflationary wave that penetrated even remote agrarian hinterlands. While structural bottlenecks in agricultural production undoubtedly caused localized, short-term price spikes, monetarists argue that these temporary supply disruptions cannot account for the secular, century-long upward trajectory of general price indices. Changes in the money supply remain the only macroeconomic variable possessing both the aggregate magnitude and the transnational reach required to generate sustained, systemic inflation across diverse regional economies that otherwise operated under disparate institutional, fiscal, and regulatory regimes.

Passage B
The monetarist account of the sixteenth-century Price Revolution falters when subjected to rigorous chronological and sector-specific scrutiny. Comprehensive historical price indices demonstrate that the sustained rise in commodity prices began in several major European regions decades before the substantial arrival of Spanish-American silver in the 1530s and 1540s. More critically, the inflation was acutely asymmetrical: agricultural staples, especially grain, experienced steep price increases, whereas manufactured goods and nominal wages lagged significantly behind. Were a deluge of circulating specie the primary driver, the classic quantity theory of money would predict a relatively uniform upward shift across all price categories. The disproportionate escalation of food prices points instead to fundamental demographic pressures. Following the catastrophic mortality of the fourteenth-century Black Death, Europe’s population experienced a sustained demographic resurgence. Because agricultural productivity was severely constrained by inelastic land availability and traditional farming techniques, soaring demand for essential foodstuffs dramatically outstripped supply, fundamentally altering relative prices. Precious metal inflows certainly amplified nominal price levels during the later phases of the century, but demographic recovery, rather than monetary expansion, initiated and structurally governed the sixteenth-century price dynamics.

Based on the passages, both authors would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements?