Tag Archives: purchasing power

The Anti-Concepts of Money The cash-value of promoting each of these anti-concepts is that they lead people to think that the central bank should impose a monetary policy. To make our lives better.  Our monetary policy is set by the Federal Reserve, which states that in pursuit of its mandate for price stability, it will engineer chronic 2% annual inflation. If we had nuclear reactor policy like this, power plant engineers would seek a slow, steady increase in core...

Physics students study mechanical systems in which pulleys are massless and frictionless. Economics students study monetary systems in which rising prices are everywhere and always caused by rising quantity of currency. There is a similarity between this pair of assumptions. Both are facile. They oversimplify reality, and if one is not careful they can lead to spectacularly wrong conclusions. And there are two key differences. One, in physics, students know that...

We discuss capital consumption all the time, because it is the megatrend of our era. However, capital consumption is an abstract idea. So let’s consider some concrete examples, to help make it clearer. Flipping Homes, Consuming Capital First, let’s look at the case of Timothy Housetrader. Tim has a small two-bedroom house. Next door, his neighbor Ian Idjit, owns a four-bedroom house which is twice the size. For some reason, Ian offers to trade houses with Tim. Both...

A paradigm is a mental framework. It has a both a positive pressure and a negative filter. It structures one’s thoughts, orients them in a certain direction, and rules out certain ideas. Paradigms can be very useful, for example the scientific method directs one to begin with facts, explain them in a consistent way, and to ignore peyote dreams from the smoke lodge and claims of mental spoon-bending. However, a paradigm can also prevent one from discovering an...

We have written much about the notion of inflation. We don’t want to rehash our many previous points, but to look at the idea of purchasing power from a new angle. Purchasing power is assumed to be intrinsic to the currency. We have said that the problem with the word inflation is that it treats two different phenomena as if they are the same. One is the presumed effect of rising quantity of dollars. The other is the...

The Baby Boom generation may be the first generation to leave less to their children than they inherited. Or to leave nothing at all. We hear lots—often from Baby Boomers—about the propensities of their children’s generation. The millennials don’t have good jobs, don’t save, don’t buy houses in the same proportions as their parents, etc. We have no doubt that attitudes have changed. That the millennials’ financial...

Bitcoin was on my radar far back as 2011, but for years, I didn’t think much of it. It was a curiosity. Nothing more. Sort of like the virtual money you use in World of Warcraft or something. In 2015, looking deeper, I slowly (not the sharpest tool in the shed) arrived at that “aha” inflection point that most advocates of honest money arrive at. I realized that a distributed public ledger has the power to change, well,...

Like any other market, there are many opinions on what a currency ought to be worth relative to others. With certain currencies, that spectrum of opinions is fairly narrow. As an example, for the world’s most traded currency – the U.S. dollar – the majority of opinions currently fall in a range from the dollar being 2% to 11% overvalued, according to organizations such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bank of...

Gold Hedges Against Currency Devaluation and Cost Of Fuel, Food, Beer and Housing  - Gold hedge against currency devaluation - cost of fuel, food, housing- True inflation figures reflect impact on household spending- Household items climbed by average 964%- Pint of beer sees biggest increase in basket of goods - rise of 2464%- Bread rises 836%, butter by 1023% and fuel (diesel) up by 1375%- Gold rises 2672% and hold's its value over 40 years- Savings eaten away by money creation and...

Every year Deutsche Bank releases its fascinating index of real-time prices around the world which looks at the cost of goods and services from a purchase-price parity basis, to determine the most expensive – and in this year’s edition, best – cities. As have done on several occasions in the past, we traditionally focus on one specific subindex: the cost of “cheap dates” in the world’s top cities. The index consists of...