[tylerhou]

How much money do you have in dollars? I have an emergency fund — 6 months of expenses. Everything else is in other assets that store value after inflation (e.g. stocks, bonds, housing).

> How does that benefit you personally?

A little bit of inflation means more economic growth in the long run. That benefits me because services and goods will get cheaper and/or better.

[reedjosh]

> How much money do you have in dollars?

Not much, in fact I try to remain leveraged via debts to hedge against inflation.

But my salary is measured in dollars. I fought hard to get the salary I have today, but I must continue to ratchet up as my employment deal looks worse every year.

I believe the Cantillion effect is largely why the average peasant's wages have not kept up with asset prices.

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect

Inflation means wealthy (with assets) get wealthier.

> A little bit of inflation means more economic growth in the long run.

When you play tricks with the CPI it does look that way. It's easy to say there's growth when revenues grow beyond a poor measure of inflation.

Inflation discourages savings and thus makes money look easy. As such, it actually encourages bad investment. Further, the business cycle that Kaynsians say are just a natural part of a large economy are really caused by over leveraged banking credit bursts.

If half of the dollars in circulation are just debts owed between banks, then that bubble bursts, it's no surprise that asset prices would fall--there's literally fewer dollars in circulation.

It's no big deal for those involved in fed policy making as they are usually the first to see it coming (and or instigate it with higher interest rates) and generally move their positions back to dollars just prior to a credit bubble burst.

But for those of us that leverage ourselves to hedge against inflation (buying a house), we get caught with a heavy loan on an asset that's no longer worth as much as the loan on it.

One should be open to viewpoints external to those provided by the people in charge of and profiting from the system.

[tylerhou]

Your salary is measured in dollars, but inflation affects your salary as well. When companies charge more for products, where do you think (some of) that extra money goes?

The rest of your comment has some interesting hypotheses (Cantillon effect, inflation encouraging bad investment) but in practice, you have to make measurements to see whether those effects actually happen. I haven't seen any empirical evidence for the Cantillon effect, and empirically we have evidence that a small amount of inflation does not decrease output (and can increase output in some cases).

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304-3932(9...

> It's no big deal for those involved in fed policy making as they are usually the first to see it coming

Even if this is true, the amount of money owned by the people controlling the Fed is miniscule.