Inflation is Dead !
Long live Inflation
I also haven’t written about inflation1 recently.
If you your receive Social Security, as I, you’ll be happy to know that it is forecast that your COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) for 2025 will be about 2.6%. That’s because .gov statisticians have determined that was the “official” rate of inflation for last year.
Yay! There’s almost no inflation!
On the Other-Other hand, there are some people who don’t trust these inflation (or any other) numbers from the government. John Williams at ShadowStats.org2 sure doesn’t trust these .gov inflation numbers, so he’s been compiling his own for the last couple of decades as shown below in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Taken from: https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts.
Real inflation is something you can take to the bank! It’s been ongoing since the founding of that private bank in 19133, owned by the banks, that controls our country’s money supply, namely that bank called The Federal Reserve, which is, as they say, about a “Federal” as is Federal Express. Inflation is caused by increasing our country’s supply-of-money way faster than our economy is growing, as shown in the plot below from the Federal Reserve itself.
Figure 2. Money Supply (M2 is a measure of the money supply that includes cash, checking deposits, and other deposits readily convertible to cash, such as CDs. There is a broader measure of the money supply, M3, but that is no longer tracked).
Most of this money created out of thin air, by the Federal Reserve Bank is for loans to the U.S. government, at interest, to finance all its deficient spending, e.g., “defense” spending, and Big Spending Programs such as the “Inflation Reduction Act” (how’s that for in-your-face Orwellian Double-Speak!).
So, hey, there is almost no inflation! Don’t believe your lying eyes; rather BELIEVE what Biden, .gov, NPR, CNN and MSNBC tell you!
Or not.
As the Native American who sold me my wolf pup a couple of decades ago told me, plain and simple, “If you want to know whether you can trust the government, just ask an Indian”. I like how George Carlin said it even better! He died in 2008. Rest his soul.
In the long run, printing money (i.e., fiat currency) always ends up in the same place, i.e., with the currency becoming worthless.
Too bad we didn’t invest our wealth more wisely.
Other postings on inflation, in my Dad’s words, “The cruelest form of taxation”:
https://timellison.substack.com/p/theres-no-inflation
https://timellison.substack.com/p/inflation-is-easy-to-understand-
https://timellison.substack.com/p/inflation-is-getting-hard-to-ignore
I see that John Williams last update to his plots on Shadowstats was over a year ago, May 2023. I E-Mailed him today; hopefully I’ll hear back and learn that he is fine, and perhaps, at age 75, retired. I’ve thought of ShadowStats as a great resource. I last corresponded with John in ‘21.
This was also when the Federal Income Tax was imposed — so that the Federal Reserve could be paid the interest on their loans. It is a trivial mathematical fact that debt on a fiat currency (fiat currency is issued as a debt with attached interest) can NEVER be paid off. So, now you know who owns our country.