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what is inflation well inflation is an expansion of the money supply that is what the word means if you think about the word inflate as a word well what is inflate well inflate means to expand right if you inflate a balloon the balloon expands so what is expanding when you talk about inflation it's the money supply the government creates new money puts more money into circulation that expansion is known as inflation deflation is the opposite you contract the money supply and money supply deflates just like a balloon you fill it with air it expands it's inflated you deflate the balloon the air comes out it contracts so that's what happens to money supply it expands and contracts now there are many effects of an expansion of the money supply one is that prices rise or sometimes prices may fall but they'll just fall by less than they would have otherwise fallen had there been no inflation but people confuse the result of inflation with inflation itself and if they don't see a rise in consumer prices they just assume there's no inflation but there could be a lot of inflation maybe without all that inflation consumers would have benefited from falling prices but instead of benefiting from falling prices in a lower cost of living they're suffering higher prices and the difference is inflation okay that makes sense so there's a lot of i julie and i listened to your podcast um the peter shift show you guys listen to it as well so on you've been talking a lot about inflation you've been talking about inflation really i mean since we started listing two years ago but a lot in the last two years and so the normal rate of inflation is the next question but i know the normal rate all depends on what the government is doing to you know what consumer prices and whatnot it's tracking to really come up with the normal inflation rate but what is historically the normal rate of inflation and what are you seeing that's happening now well there is no normal rate i mean ideally if you're talking about prices consumer prices because most people when they talk about inflation talk about you know consumer prices the normal thing in a free market economy for consumer prices is to go down that's what's normal and in fact if you look at the us economy in the 18th a century right from 1800 or rather the 19th century the 1800s from 1801 to 1900 prices fell for 100 years i mean the general price level in 1900 was half of what it was in 1800 so things prices cut were cut in half over 100 years and and during that 100-year period of falling prices americans prospered i mean if you look at the second half of the 19th century the industrial revolution um those that economic growth that we enjoyed as americans during that period far exceeds anything that's taken place since either in the the 20th or now the 21st century so we had massive economic growth yet prices were going down pretty much every year so we don't get that anymore we get rising prices i don't know what the normal rate the historic average uh rate is certainly lower in the last decade than it has been but a lot of that is based on the way the met the government measures prices because over time the cpi right or some of the other official government yardsticks have been dramatically altered so that no matter how much prices go up the cpi doesn't really reflect that and i think that is by design i mean the government creates inflation deliberately for its own purposes its own benefit but then it wants to cover up the effects of inflation so the public doesn't complain and the fed can continue to justify its monetary policy but you know if we still measured prices using the exact cpi that we used to measure them in the 70s i think the annual gains would already be well into the double digits in fact for 2021 the first digit may be a two not even a one that's how bad it already is and it's going to be even worse in 2022.
so paint us a picture about that peter what what do you believe is the the real if if you can because i've talked i've heard you talk and you just mentioned that how they report it isn't exactly covering everything it's mixed uh statistics what do you think the real uh rate of affliction of inflation is now and paying us a picture for a year out where are we headed well it's high i think it's again it's double digits it's north of 10 and headed higher and there's no relief in sight if anything it's going to get worse because from the government's perspective allowing inflation to get worse is better than fighting it because if they fight it they're going to immediately set off a chain of events that is politically a non-starter right if the federal government were to or the fed were to fight inflation we would have not only another real estate crash stock market crash bond market crash we'd be in a depression and the u.s government would have to slash spending i mean we wouldn't be talking about how much new stimulus we're going to get it would be how much of the old stimulus are we going to lose right the government would have to contract see there's a big difference if you look at where we were in the housing bubble that kind of popped you know in 07 right the federal reserve under greenspan lowered interest rates to 1 that was a mistake and then it took the fed a long time to get back up to around five percent that was also a mistake and during that period of time we inflated this housing bubble but at least the fed tried to normalize interest rates and it was the increase in interest rates that pricked that housing bubble because it increased the cost of financing a home and then by increasing the finance costs it you know made homes more expensive more people couldn't people could no longer afford to pay those prices prices started to fall when prices started to fall people started mailing in their keys because they they couldn't make their payments a lot of people had adjustable rate mortgages that reset with the higher rates and you know it was a collapse but this time the fed lowered interest rates to zero which was an even bigger mistake than one and has left them there pretty much for the last 12 years i mean there was maybe one year one and a half years where you know we got above zero we got up to about two percent and then we went right back down to zero but the fed never normalized interest rates nor do i think they have any intention of even lifting interest rates above zero you
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