which became a hedge fund data provider

> What you really need to understand about inflation, is that we've had particularly exceptionally low long-term inflation in America for the last 50 years, outside of stagflation in the '70s.

What you really need to understand is that we can, and we must absolutely, generally and non-exceptionally have low inflation at all times. There's absolutely no sane reason to have high inflation in a low-corruption financial system - none!

> Globalization... US Navy... US military... China hybrid... American lack of enthusiasm for guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans.

A bunch of red herrings meaning nothing... It's not lack of enthusiasm, it's the overabundance of enthusiasm for tariffs and sanctions backed by the same US Navy & US Military to maintain a restricted trade regime which, not-accidentally, results in the US public being trapped in a monopolized and inflationary market.

> And that involves a huge amount of switching costs, which essentially is going to be inflation.

You mean, the population will bear the costs via the inflation tax, while the rich will be getting richer, because... historical norms should not be broken, especially this one?

Historically, messed up trade led to global wars, actually, it's either global trade or global wars, there's no middle ground. You failed to mention that important historical norm which is also one of the ways to make the rich richer.

The historical norms are something we should absolutely steer clear of, not use them as excuses for more nonsense in the future!

> But essentially what Trump is doing is in line with everything I've described.

No. Trump's tariffs are too unfocused to accomplish any goal besides increasing American inflation from what I've read.

Trump's tariffs on raw materials, metals, etc make no sense whatsoever.

Motivating the creation of new mines or refining facilities should have been done through subsidies, possibly combined with promise of future tariffs.

And, obviously, Trump's tariffs on raw materials raise the cost of construction & composite products, which will likely push manufacturing out of the U.S.

>Globalization is fundamentally enabled by the US Navy and US military supremacy guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans.

>This has not been the historical Norm. It's actually historical anomaly caused by the power vacuum of world war II, and secondarily by the fact that the Cold war was between the US and maritime power and Russia, who are effectively landlocked.

>This combined with American lack of enthusiasm for maintaining this global order, likely means that globalization will come to an end.

Oh here friend, I think you forget to add a citation to all that, here's your citation so people know where the idea come from (not you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zeihan

Do you have any evidence it was shut down by the Fed? I looked briefly at the BPP numbers and they aren't that far off the CPI. There were even a few times it was lower than the CPI. There was a 2 year period that BPP was noticeably higher but it eventually converged.

https://thebillionpricesproject.com/datasets/

What’s crazy is that of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about. It’s something that consumers can more or less directly observe, so having an official number that’s much below people’s “wallet meter” is doing nothing but erode trust in government. In fact, given that a steady inflation rate actually leads to bigger and bigger price increases, most people are going to feel worse about it at a visceral level. If the government wanted to build credibility with the public, they’d come up with a metric that better aligns with people’s actual economic situations. But then that might lead to people demanding higher wages, so I guess it’s a nonstarter in America.

Honesty would require admitting that the parties are different. They are not the same, they have different values, and we can see that by who gains and loses power in the party. Which actions are unacceptable, and which actions are rewarded.

The difference is stark!

> EDIT: The democrat brigade is busy downvoting me to deny reality. Poor children!

Per the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

HN Guidelines

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

The problem with gold is that it's price fluctuates just like any other commodity. The practical uses of gold accounts for only ~8% of gold mined, while half is for vanity (jewelry, a luxury product) and the rest for speculation and reserves. Similar to fiat, most of the value in gold is in people believing it has value.

So there was no inflation whatsoever between 1980 and 2000. In fact there was slight deflation since the price of gold actually declined?

It’s easy to make data to fit your narrative when you ignore everything that conflicts with it..

The price of gold is not immediately responsive to goods inflation, it can be lagging or leading and the correlation can also fluctuate. Long term it's been good at tracking money supply but short term it doesn't necessarily give you a timely signal.

> ShadowStats

Just no:

> Responding to prior criticisms made by economist James Hamilton, John Williams explained in a private phone call that Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers.[28]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com#Negative

    SHADOWSTATS(t) = 1.9 + 0.0055*t + CPIAUCNS(t)

* https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r...

> Truflation

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1beg6db/how_r...

> Billion Prices

They actually published code so other folks could recreate:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project

I briefly scanned the BPP data and it was pretty close to the official CPI. The BPP is usually a bit higher, and for a short time noticeably higher, but they generally converge.

https://thebillionpricesproject.com/datasets/

truflation has inflation at 2% right now, not 10%

https://truflation.com/marketplace/us-inflation-rate

If you actually stop and think about it for a couple seconds, you should realize immediately that a “secret” inflation rate of 10% is impossible. You can lie about that for a month or two, but 10% annual inflation means prices double every 7 years, which is obviously not what we observe.

We're losing 10% of our money annually. That's absolutely insane.