Tag: inflation

The Achilles Heel Of The Fiat Money System

The fiat money system will not disappear just like that. Any expectations or hopes to that end should be tempered. Yes, the fiat money system could collapse; yet there is a significant likelihood it will persist longer than most people might think. This prolonged existence may come at a cost: a fascist state encroachment on the freedoms of citizens and entrepreneurs would be more profound than most people realize.

Much ink has been spilt about the impending collapse of the international fiat money system. It is a debate that naturally gains momentum in times of crisis—as witnessed in the aftermath of the 2008/9 global financial market debacle or the politically dictated global lockdown crash of 2020/21.

At the same time, however, it is entirely justified to harbor significant concerns regarding the fiat money system. After all, it is plagued by blatant economic and ethical defects.

Are you wondering about the essence of fiat money? Let’s break it down into three characteristics:

  • State-sponsored central banks wield a monopoly over the production of fiat central bank money. Upon obtaining fiat central bank money, commercial banks are allowed to generate their own money, known as fiat commercial bank money.
  • Fiat money is typically created through lending without the backing of real savings. It is essentially created out of thin air (or ex nihilo, as it is called in Latin).
  • Fiat money predominantly exists in dematerialized form. While it may manifest as colorful printed pieces of paper, its primary existence resides in digital entries on computer systems, represented by bits and bytes.

Whether we’re talking about the United States dollar, euro, Chinese renminbi, Japanese yen, British pound, or Swiss franc, they are all fiat money. We know from monetary theory that fiat money is not “natural” or “innocent.” Unlike moneys emerging from voluntary agreements in the free marketplace, fiat money was introduced through state intervention—involving coercion and violence—leading to many negative effects.

Fiat money is inherently inflationary, gradually losing its purchasing power over time. This phenomenon disproportionately benefits a select few at the expense of the broader population.

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On Wealth Inequality, the Left Has a Point

The federal government has been waging a war against the middle class and working poor since at least 1970. Wealth inequality has steadily increased since the early 1970s, and it’s not a coincidence. It’s a result of a series of policies. The government wants the masses of American working people broke, propertyless, and dependent upon elected officials for the crumbs they give back as handouts from taxes taken.

The most insidious attack on working people has been inflation, which really took off when the federal government decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971.

The inflation tax is the most regressive tax that currently exists in federal policy.

Inflation always taxes wages twice, once when the labor is performed and the worker is awaiting payment, and again when the wages are deposited into the worker’s checking account. But inflation leaves the rich man’s yacht untaxed.

No level of inflation, no matter how high, can ever take one cent of value away from a yacht. A yacht is always going to be a yacht, no matter what the value of money is.

Inflation taxes the poor man’s rent he advances to his landlord, but leaves private jets and vacation homes untaxed.

Want to know where this inflation tax goes? The stolen value of the inflation tax doesn’t just vanish out of thin air.

Some of it goes to the government; economists even have a name for the benefit government draws from the inflation tax. It’s called “seigniorage.”

Rich people generally don’t pay the inflation tax, and many of them benefit from it. Let’s say you’re a billionaire real estate mogul, not unlike Donald Trump, with a net-worth of $1 billion. You buy houses and real estate, and when you get your 20% equity, you pull that equity out and invest it into another real estate holding. So you have properties worth $5 billion, net assets of $1 billion, and (with only 20% equity in your properties) you also have $4 billion in mortgage debt.

4% inflation lowers the value of the mortgage debt you owe, since with CPI inflation you’re just going to raise the rent 4% next year. Inflation created by the Federal Reserve Bank becomes a gift of $160 million annually to your net worth ($4 billion x 0.04).

Every year.

And it enriches them more if inflation exceeds 4%, as it has in recent years.

If the CPI is 10% (as it nearly was in 2022), inflation alone adds 40% ($400 million) to this real estate mogul’s net worth. That doesn’t count the decrease in the nominal debt paid off by the real estate mogul’s tenants.

And this assumes the value of his property holdings is only increasing at the rate of CPI inflation, which it’s vastly exceeding, thanks to Federal Reserve Bank interest rate manipulation and federal housing subsidies and incentives.

Inflation enriches the real estate mogul with a boatload of mortgages that are now easier to pay off. It also benefits the hedge fund speculator and the banker, who are in the very businesses of being in debt.

In other words, the inflation tax makes the value of money flow directly from the wallets of wage-earners to the vaults of rich people who work with debt.

As long as the working man holds money in his possession, whether in the form of credit to his employer for his labor, in his pocket, or in his checking account, inflation taxes him. Only when the money is finally no longer due to him does the inflation tax end.

Working people know this truth intuitively because inflation raises prices at the grocery store, at the hardware store, at the department store, and the price of real estate.

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27% of Americans Are Skipping Meals Because of Skyrocketing Food Costs, Survey Shows

The price of food has jumped by 25% since the start of the pandemic — even more if you factor in the cost of a quick trip to the store, which takes into consideration the price of fuel. Now, a new study says there are some major ramifications.

Intuit Credit Karma, which provides information about financial products, says that more than one-quarter of the people it surveyed said they have skipped meals or sacrificed other spending due to rising costs. The survey of 2,011 adults was conducted online in the United States during the week of May 7. 

According to the survey, 28% said they are putting off paying for necessities, such as rent or other bills, to afford groceries — while 27% say they are occasionally skipping meals. Another 18% have applied for or have considered applying for food stamps and other types of assistance, and 15% rely on or have considered visiting food banks for their groceries.

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Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act Screws Seniors with the Biggest Medicare Premium Increase Ever

One of the classic strategies in the Obama/Biden playbook is policy that sounds good in the short-term, but whose long-term consequences won’t be felt until after an election. That way if Democrats win, they’re insulated from voters holding them accountable; but if they lose, they can blame Republicans when things go south.

This was undoubtedly one of the plays the Biden administration had in mind for the gallingly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But this disastrous legislation hasn’t just sabotaged Americans’ wallets, it’s sabotaged their health as well.

Snuck into the IRA was a poorly drafted provision that attempted to lower out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs. The IRA lowers the out-of-pocket maximum for seniors from about $3,300 to $2,000 by shifting the responsibility for the $1,300 difference to insurance companies. To no one’s surprise, the insurance companies pass that cost to consumers in the form of higher premiums and restricted access to prescription drugs.

This year, premiums for Medicare Part D are up more than 20 percent for the more than 50 million Americans enrolled. In 2025, they could increase again by more than 50 percent! We hope people are paying close enough attention during open enrollment in October to compare this price spike as President Biden campaigns on how he “fought Big Pharma to lower drug costs!”

The brilliant design of the Medicare Part D program 20 years ago was harnessing competition. Deploying the free-market principle that competition leads to lower prices, Part D allowed private insurance plans to compete for Medicare dollars to keep costs low and save seniors money.

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Think Inflation Is Done? Think Again!

In this article I focus on two reasons why inflation will rise leading to higher, not lower, interest rates and bond yields. The first is the destruction of credit’s value through its non-productive expansion, mainly by governments running budget deficits. The second has had almost no attention but is at least as serious: the consequences of the repatriation of supply chains being accelerated by trade tariffs and sanctions. I shall briefly comment on the first before turning my attention to the second.

Budget deficits always debase the currency

Margret Thatcher said something on the lines that socialism fails when it runs out of other peoples’ money. We appear to have reached that point. Rapacious tax policies are now reducing their yield. We are now sliding down the after-end of the Laffer curve. The economic force which drives any economy is being strangled by the burden of government.Leopold, LesBest Price: $17.09Buy New $17.80(as of 11:37 UTC – Details)

Consequently, with mandated welfare and other expenses increasing, hopes that economic growth will reduce budget deficits are misplaced. Estimates for budget deficits in nearly all high-tax jurisdictions will turn out to be overly optimistic. This has important implications for inflation which are currently being ignored by everyone from governments, central banks, and down to investors.

Take the situation in the USA. As recently as February, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a budget deficit of $1,507 billion for the current fiscal year. Yet in the first six months, the deficit was already $1,100 billion, according to the US Treasury’s own figures. But this fails to explain the pace of borrowing. According to the US Debt Clock, US national debt is $34.77 trillion today, an increase of $1,600 billion this fiscal year so far. At this rate it will be $2.4 trillion by end-September, nearly a trillion over the CBO deficit estimate. It represents 9% of GDP, raw unproductive credit driving GDP higher and creating an illusion of a strong economy.

I suspect the budget deficit could turn out to be even worse, partly because it is a presidential election year, partly because the debt ceiling is not in place until January 2025, and partly because the productive economy is already in recession. This last assumption is based on simple arithmetic. If, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics GDP grew by 4.5% in the year to last March, allowing for a budget deficit injection of 9% means the private sector actually contracted by 4.5%.

A rough and ready calculation perhaps, but it is important to understand that not only is the expansion of non-productive government debt concealing the true economic situation, but it is also debasing the currency. And currency debasement becomes reflected in higher prices. In other words, the inflation of CPI prices is not over.

The rest of this article examines how and why government attempts to protect domestic production and employment through trade tariffs and sanctions end up accelerating price inflation even more. The world saw the economically destructive consequences of anti-trade policies in the wake of the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which are still relevant today.

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NYC hotel rates reach record highs as city fills rooms with illegal immigrants

New York City hotel prices have reached an all-time high due in large part to the unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants arriving from the southern border. The city turned to hotels to house the immigrants, many of which are paid to house the immigrants. 

As of late 2023, the average price for a one-night stay at a hotel in the Big Apple was over $300, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the previous year. While that has dipped slightly over the first few months of 2024, the summer tourism season is expected to bring with it another jump in prices.  

City policies, such as the “Sanctuary Hotel Program,” as reported on by the New York Times, also have contributed to the increase by shortening the supply of open rooms. When it was started in 2022, city officials said that the hotels were paid between $139 and $185 a room each night, whether or not the room is occupied. 

As The Times reports, inflation also played a role in the rising costs, even though the rate of inflation has fallen since 2022. 

Despite the high cost of accommodation, the city is anticipating around 70 million visitors this year. Hotel Association of New York City CEO Vijay Dandapani said he believes things will only get better with time.  

“At some point this migrant crisis is going to peter out,” he said, “and … you’re going to have a lowering of rates and it will become more affordable.”  

According to commercial real estate data provider CoStar, over 140 hotels have been temporarily or permanently transformed into shelters for illegal immigrants, bringing with them 16,000 rooms that are no longer available for tourists.  

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Chief Economic Adviser Refuses To Admit Biden Is LYING About Inflation

Joe Biden’s chief economic advisor refused to admit Thursday that the president keeps telling a huge lie by claiming that inflation was at 9 percent when he took office when it was really at 1.4 percent and shot up to 9 percent under Biden himself.

During an interview on Fox Business, host Neil Cavuto grilled Jared Bernstein, and told him directly “you’re lying,” and “just as bad” as Biden when he tried to dodge the matter.

After Biden took office inflation surged to rates unseen since the early 1980s, peaking at an annual rate of 9.1 percent in June 2022, a full 17 months after he became president.

Yet, he keeps claiming it was ALREADY at 9 percent and that he inherited a weakened economy from Trump.

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Biden REPEATS Whopping LIE About Inflation Being 9% When He Took Office

They say that if you repeat a lie, no matter how big, loud and often then people will eventually believe it, and it seems Joe Biden is doing just that.

On Tuesday Biden repeated the outright lie that inflation was at 9 percent when he took office in January 2021.

Biden was already raked over the coals for this claim last week. There’s no way that he or his handlers don’t know it’s false.

In reality, after Biden took office inflation surged to rates unseen since the early 1980s, peaking at an annual rate of 9.1 percent in June 2022, a full 17 months after he became president.

Yet, he is claiming it was ALREADY at 9 percent.

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ALL HE DOES IS LIE: Biden Claims Inflation Was 9 Percent When He Took Office (It Was 1.4 Percent)

It is sometimes hard to tell whether Joe Biden is lying or simply demented, but either way he is spreading false information to protect his terrible economic record.

In an interview on CNN, Biden claimed that inflation was running at nine per cent when he seized office in January 2021:

No president had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9 per cent when I came into office, 9 percent. But it — look, people have a right to be concerned, ordinary people. The idea that you bounce a check and you get a $30 fee for bouncing the check, I changed that, you can’t charge more than 8 bucks for that or your credit card, your late payment, $35. There’s corporate greed going on out there, and it’s got to be dealt with.

The combination of the inflation, the cost of inflation, all those things, that’s really worrisome to people, with good reason. That’s why I’m working very hard to bring the cost of rentals down, to increase the number of homes that are available.

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California’s Catastrophic Minimum-Wage Surge: A Recipe for Disaster Unfolds

The Golden State stubbornly disregards warning signs surrounding the wage hike policies advocated by progressive unions.

According to National Review, California recently rolled out a groundbreaking $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers. However, labor unions, and their radical activist allies, are now pushing hard to expand this wage rate into other industries.

In examining California’s wage policies, it becomes obvious that the likely outcomes have a predictable path. One notable case study highlights the consequences of a near-$20 minimum-wage model, which unfolded within the state’s purview.

In 2021, Unite Here Local 11, a prominent labor organization situated in Los Angeles, orchestrated a series of actions that resulted in a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel employees within West Hollywood. This wage floor represented the highest across the nation. 

Not content with this achievement, the union swiftly expanded its advocacy efforts towards larger targets. These efforts eventually resulted in the adoption of this wage standard across all sectors within the municipality.

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