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ArkyBeagle t1_iv2vaz9 wrote

Reply to comment by oxfouzer in The company WHAM-O (known for producing toys) also had an extremely limited run of firearms under the brand name WAMO by Doobliheim

Asset inflation is not monetary inflation. That rather is the point. To the extent that is has any use at all, CPI models monetary inflation.

I'd expect them to be decorrelated. Trying to make the correlated brings real problems.

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oxfouzer t1_iv4uhea wrote

Funny how every time I use simple silver math I get consistent prices huh? Like, how much does a cheap pistol cost these days? Oh, like $400? The amount I calculated using simple precious metals?

So 70 years ago I could get a cheap pistol for 21 oz of silver, and today I can get a cheap pistol for 21 oz of silver?

Nah, it must be bad math. I bet the CPI inflation calculator is more accurate - not like it’s a completely manipulated metric, controlled by people whose sole interest is to underrepresent it or anything.

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ArkyBeagle t1_iv6uvg1 wrote

This is a very good point but it will only hold for certain goods. Sorta "pawn shop goods" if you will. I don't think it holds for all such goods.

I don't know of a vetted data set that shows this correlation holds over time, either. Do you know of one? I'd be interested if you do.

Over time, the fashion has been to emphasize the "unit of exchange" property of money over the "store of value" property. There are practical reasons for this.

It's known ( to monetarists , not everybody ) that inflation is usually - the present one is the exception - caused by error in money supply creation. Some people think the error is necessary but some do not. SFAIK, the main goal isn't anything more than avoiding deflation and another Depression. There's the use of it of maintaining government funding. If the economy could actually treat the government as an outage and route around it, I suspect it would. But there's actually emerging Marxist theory about why it doesn't. It's Marx-based and not completely contained in works like Kapital. It could also be wrong; it's emerging.

I'd also throw in the the Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market in silver shows another weakness of specie.

But SFAIK it's known that CPI has problems. It's required because of the Fed's dual mandate. That sort of thing is again done in memory of the Depression.

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oxfouzer t1_iv70cp2 wrote

I’m so dubious on Fed monetary policy. It’s clearly been a 100-year failure. I do “silver math” with lots of stuff and it’s almost always right. Like a Sears home built in 1920 - the purchase price when adjusted with “silver math” comes out to almost exactly its current market value. CPI calculator had it at half.

And yeah, the hunt brothers saga is a bit of a boone, but if you average around it just a little then things still fall into place.

Basically, my contention is that current CPI metrics basically always indicate things as being worth half of what they really are. Because the people who control those numbers are incentivized for it to do so.

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ArkyBeagle t1_iv744wi wrote

> It’s clearly been a 100-year failure.

I'm less sure of that than you are. I made the mistake of reading ( most of ) "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960" and the various panics and crashes of the 19th century were a big problem. Some of that is having money denominated in metals, some of it was stubborn attachment to other ideology.

Also - I suspect that the "Bernanke Put" worked great. That's more or less what the Fed was designed for - it was inspired by JP Morgan's ending of the Panic of 1907. Morgan died in 1913 so that avenue was lost. I think it shows well just how important an historical figure he was, regardless of any negative perception of him.

> Like a Sears home built in 1920 - the purchase price when adjusted with “silver math” comes out to almost exactly its current market value. CPI calculator had it at half.

Interesting. I'm just hoping that is not a coincidence.

I did find this:

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/3351/commodity-silver/26743/consumer-price-index-sa-yoy-silver

I'm not 100% sure there's always been signal there. But the 10 and 5 year '"breakeven" rates seem pretty stable ( which is literally half of the dual mandate ). Does that mean it's an overly managed figure ( if I read you right ) ? Possibly. They could work out to the silver figures run thru a "low pass filter", something econometricians do.

> the hunt brothers saga is a bit of a boone

If our currency was silver-backed I don't think speculation would be legal so it's a wee bit specious on my part to bring that up. It does however show that commodity money earns the seemingly-counterintuitive property of feeding instability. You'd think otherwise, right? Well...

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