How Central Banks Are Stealing Your MoneySince the merger between the Fed and the Treasury (kidding, kind of), I've had so many conversations with individuals outside of the financial industry who struggle to fully grasp how central banks are stealing their money. Today, I'm going to share a short and simple post which I hope will help explain the direct effect of "money printing," on the working class. Let's jump right into it.
When interest rates remain low for an extended period of time (historically), risk assets become more prone to rampant speculation (lucky for those holding assets outside of cash), leading to massive distortions in the underlying fundamentals of those assets, and historical valuation deviations from the mean (which is mathematically unsustainable). The rapidily rising prices of both assets, and goods & services, which is not being stimulated by an actual increase in the velocity of money, but rather from central banks artificially flooding the monetary system with liquidity (while interest rates are near zero), contributes to a lower standard of living for those holding cash as their primary asset.
For example:
If you have $100 in your bank account, and perhaps this is your only asset, then the central bank increases the money supply by 25%, what they've just done is increase the denominator which underpins the value of that $100.
Here's a simple logical demonstration:
100/100 = 1 (baseline purchasing power.)
100/125 = 0.80 (a 25% increase in the money supply in this example, as a result of central bank money printing, results in a 20% loss in purchasing power.)
In essence, in this hypothetical situation, you've just lost 20% of your purchasing power. With CPI in the US running at 5.4% YoY vs the Fed's 2% "target," we're currently looking at an inflation rate almost triple the Fed's goal. The US10Y yield trades at 1.25% while CPI is 5.4%, and the Fed continues to print $1.44 Trillion on an annualized basis, with no end in sight. Welcome to the wonderfully horrific world of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Anyone looking for a hedge?
