Basic Reports

Transitory Inflation and Useless Ingredients

Transitory Inflation and Useless Ingredients

To listen to the audio version of this article click here Can you remember back to when you were two or three years old? Toddlers often think that there are little people inside the TV (or maybe this was only true when the TV was about as deep as it was wide—and maybe kids today […]

About that Spike in the Silver Price… 22 July

The price of silver has just spiked up about $2.00—that’s about 10%. All the usual suspects have been calling for silver to skyrocket. With some amusement, we have been watching ads from a guy known for savvy junior mining stock investments, who has been calling for gold to go up for a while. And recently, […]

Growing Dollar Demand, Silver Weirdness, Market Report, 15 June

The Federal Reserve has become more aggressive again, after several years of acting docile. As you can see on this chart of the Fed’s balance sheet, it has very rapidly expanded from a baseline from (prior to) 2015 through 2018, of about $4.4 trillion. After which, it had attempted to taper, getting down to $3.8 […]

How to Maintain a Bull Market after Covid

How To Maintain A Bull Market after Covid

Everyone thinks they know the cause and effect of the Federal Reserve’s response to crises such as 2008 and 2020. The Fed prints money to buy assets. This increases the quantity of money. And this causes prices to rise. The Fed wants this, because it thinks that inflation eases the burden on debtors. The mainstream […]

The End of an Epoch, Report 8 Dec

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” What the heck did […]

Money and Prices Are a Dynamic System, Report 1 Dec

The basic idea behind the Quantity Theory of Money could be stated as: too much money supply is chasing too little goods supply, so prices rise. We have debunked this from several angles. For example, we can use a technique that every first year student in physics is expected to know. Dimensional analysis looks at […]

Raising Rates to Fight Inflation, Report 24 Nov

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 […]

I Know Usury When I See It, Report 4 Aug

“I know it, when I see it.” This phrase was first used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in a case of obscenity. Instead of defining it—we would think that this would be a requirement for a law, which is of course backed by threat of imprisonment—he resorted to what might be called Begging […]

Nonmonetary Cause of Lower Prices, Report 5 May

Over the past several weeks, we have debunked the idea that purchasing power—i.e. what a dollar can buy—is intrinsic to the currency itself. We have discussed a large non-monetary force that drives up prices. Governments at every level force producers to add useless ingredients, via regulation, taxation, labor law, environmentalism, etc. These are ingredients that […]

The Two Faces of Inflation, Report 22 Apr

We have a postscript to last week’s article. We said that rising prices today are not due to the dollar going down. It’s not that the dollar buys less. It’s that producers are forced to include more and more ingredients, which are not only useless to the consumer. But even invisible to the consumer. For […]