> USD seems to hold its value pretty well.

The Consumer Price Index has inflated by a factor of more than 15 from January 1947 through March 2026 [1]. That's an annual rate of inflation of about 3.45 percent. That's an indication of how the USD does not hold its value--if you have a stock of dollars that you want to hold the same buying power year to year, you have to add 3.45 percent to it every year just to stay even.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

It's hilarious how much weeping there is about deflationary or non-inflationary currency when a top prized goal of technology and progress is to deflate the value of goods and services. Intuitively everyone knows they want prices to go down *. If 'people will horde whatever deflates or doesn't reliably inflate' is true then people would be trading all their dollars for stocks/real estate/precious metals and then buying nothing but gruel and a cardboard box to live in. The whole premise is hilarious.

The tied-biggest in the US boom happened under the gold standard between the end of the civil war and WW1 during which time the dollar was mostly ever so slightly deflationary. Ending the gold standard completely though did allow congress to tax people even better through the back door of inflation, though, and of course magically then the academic apparatus suddenly found a gazillion academics arguing why inflationary currency is good.

The method by which modern economics PhDs pile you with a gazillion man-decades of research of words to pull the wool over your eyes while simultaneously making it effectively impossible to disprove all of it within any concise or manageable period of time means the inflation worshippers can always hold the argument long enough for the casual observer to lose interest. Quite genius.

* But muh popularity of argument doesn't mean it is true. Said by the same bullshit artists point out an overwhelming body of economists as data to suggest something is more likely to be true.