I think your chart shows the "that inflation slowly erodes purchasing power over time." That doesn't mean there aren't periods of change - if you study economic history at all you know about the Great Depression and stagflation - but for ~50 years it's been pretty well managed.
Interesting, but not quite as dramatic as I assumed from the title.
#1 creates oversupply of dollars and #2 and #3 lower demand. This study supports the idea that wars can indeed destroy purchasing power.
China doesn’t seem to be squeezed when they seem to have a deal with Iran to buy in yuan.
Agreed. Which is why the Chinese do NOT want their currency to become the Petrodollar or world's reserve currency. They know that that is what destroyed US Manufacturing. China wants to maintain their manufacturing dominance. They've seen what de-industrialization has done to the US.
Doesn't that mean $3.05 in 1914 us worth $100 today?
I think it is astonishing that we accept that in a best case scenario of sustained 2% inflation, we are literally planning for the value of the dollar to be cut in half every 36 years.
Our system is designed to encourage asset ownership, not cash saving. If you stuff it under a mattress for 36 years, yeah you'll get fleeced. Buying a house and stocks is the only way to keep up.
Technically, it does mean that $3.05 from 1914 is worth $100 today, but that's not a useful way of thinking about this. I.e., if your great-grandfather put $3.05 in an envelope in 1914 and you opened it today, it's still $3.05 worth of money (ignoring wheat pennies being a collectors items and whatnot).
A lot of money is printed.
Also, war is not an activity that generates wealth (but to some it does, obviously).
It's the issue Russia is facing right now in Ukraine. Even if Putin wanted to stop, his economy has turned entirely wartime, when it ends the country crashes on itself.
The commonality between all four of these incidents is that they correspond to severe supply shocks:
- During WWI and WWII, industrial supply was rerouted by force to the war effort, leaving normal consumer demand unfulfilled.
- During the oil crisis of the 70s, a critical energy input to the American economy massively increased in price due to sanctions placed on America.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant chunk of workers were paid not to work, as a form of deliberate supply destruction to avoid the spread of a novel coronavirus.
In a "normal" economy, supply is flexible enough that you can print money and nobody even notices. The supply curve is smooth and gradual, so prices only rise a little. When supply is constrained, however, prices rise to whatever value is necessary to curtail demand, because they have to. The supply curve is a brick wall.
My parents bought a house in the 1970s. Because of the inflation that occurred during that time, incomes and expenses rose, yet long-term debt obligations such as fixed mortgages remained unchanged; their mortgage payment was the same in year 30 as in year 1.
I guess another way to say it is that during an inflationary period, the people who HAVE money suffer the loss of its purchasing power. But the people who OWE money benefit from the dollar not being what it used to be.
C'mon. Whether you agree or not, any time spent in the field will expose you to this philosophy. If you disagree, ignore. There's no need to go through implicit ideas.
Finally the events are quite cherry-picked. It is a conclusion looking for a result, when the statistical reason for choosing those 4 events simply isn't evident when you look at the data itself. There is no mathematical rule you could apply to your dataset that would distinctly highlight those 4 periods.
If anything the data points at "inflation targeting works and is producing slow and steady inflation" rather than "inflation comes in concentrated bursts".
In 1971, the United States ended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.
This allowed for the global reserve currency to float which allowed for global credit expansion at the cost of the dollar value but with the benefit of more overall dollars (monetary velocity increasing)
This is what politicians want because it makes the dollar printing machine the most powerful thing, hence why everyone hung on the fedchair words every few months.
So the USD is already hyperinflated but the price relative to other currencies is still high.
Once that price collapses (and it eventually will and increasingly soon) the entire US will look like the rust belt.
latentframe•1h ago
SpicyLemonZest•40m ago
steveBK123•37m ago
golemotron•16m ago
latentframe•35m ago
SpicyLemonZest•17m ago
hyperpape•34m ago
windenntw•29m ago
Also this way of framing "As of February 2026, the US dollar has lost 96.9% of its purchasing power relative to January 1914. This means that $100 in 1914 would buy only approximately $3.05 worth of goods today" is of course math-correct but difficult to understand intuitively.
I think it makes more sense to explain it in the opposite direction or in both directions: "$100 in 1914 would buy only approximately $3.05 worth of goods today, or equivalently, $100 in 1914 is worth ~ $3278 nowdays (because 100 / 3.05 ~= 32.78 "
This also makes it easier to understand that the term "millionaire == person that has 1 million USD" only makes sense around 1914, because the equivalent amount of wealth nowdays would be "millionaire == person that has 32 million USD"
Anyways, I liked a lot this visualization https://mlde8o0xa4ew.i.optimole.com/cb:VNTn.d9a/w:auto/h:aut... that visualizes the compression in time of the big value changes.
RobotToaster•8m ago
If you had $100 in 1914 $10 coins you would have $24,800 in gold.
post-it•27m ago