[bun_at_work]

This comment betrays your misunderstanding of the financial institutions and systems at play here.

The Fed's goal is to maintain inflation at 2% for reasons more complicated than I'll discuss here. If you're interested here is a source you might like: > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30231791-the-end-of-alch...

[reedjosh]

I understand the goal and all of the justifications of Kaynsian economics. I don't have a misunderstanding of it, but a disagreement with it.

See Bitcoin Standard podcast and or book for more on hard money and economics under it.

https://saifedean.com/thebitcoinstandard/

And or the Mises Institute for the low down on Austrian economic viewpoints that answer many of the questions that Kaynsians can't.

https://mises.org/what-austrian-economics

And on top of that the fed itself says we've already had 4.2% CPI inflation this year.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/latest-numbers.htm

But, that's trusting the stakeholders in the inflation game to be honest.

If you remove the constant adjustments to the CPI you get a _much_ higher rate of inflation than governments will admit.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

[lowkey]

> The Fed's goal is to maintain inflation at 2% for reasons more complicated than I'll discuss here.

It would be amazing if you could make the effort to explain the complicated reasons why the Fed's inflationary policy is a good thing. I have yet to hear a sound argument why sound money is worse for the people, than an inflationary currency. I can see how it would benefit the government to hide the true cost of taxation via inflation, but why does it ever benefit the individual to have their wealth diluted by the process of inflation, even if it is "only" by about 2% per year?

[bun_at_work]

I can't do this topic justice from memory, but you seem to be genuinely interested, so I'll say what I can.

It seems related to the petrodollar system. This is where the world uses USD for energy (OPEC only sells oil for dollars). This forces countries who need oil to acquire dollars. However, there's a problem with that: a limited supply of dollars. How do we fix that problem? Use a fiat currency (not backed by something tangible) that allows us to print more money as necessary. How much more should we print? The target is 2% inflation, so that much is what the experts in this topic think.

This petrodollar system does a lot more than just force us to have inflation. The subject from here becomes more and more complicated, because monetary systems are highly complicated. There's a lot going on in the US fiscal policy, and the impacts vary from very good to very bad, depending on your perspective. It's in fact so complicated that I can imagine for every perspective there are good parts and bad parts of our monetary system.

This is an excellent write-up from Lyn Alden (very good financial writer) on the petrodollar system and it's impacts: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

There's a lot of talk in this thread and on the internet in general, especially around cryptocurrencies, that is massively oversimplified and doesn't pay any mind to the fact that, like any other field, there are many very intelligent people working to solve very difficult problems. If a monetary policy can be summed up in one sentence, it's probably not a good policy.