> Have you seen the dollar’s buying power recently?
Yeah, its up like 100% over Bitcoin and like +30% over Euro, Yen, and GBP? In fact, holding Cash/USD has been basically one of the best performing things in my entire portfolio this year (after oil/energy)
USD is hugely up vs Yen and Euro. You buy anything from overseas recently? USD is hugely strong. USD is up vs the stock market, vs the bond market, vs the overseas bond market, vs overseas stocks.
USD is also up vs Bitcoin.
EDIT: Feel free to look at gold, silver, and other 'inflation hedges' while you're at it. The main thing going up is commodities (oil and food), which is certainly important. But there's more to the world than those two things.
Inflation is basically the exact definition of the change in USD's value relative to goods & services.
Unless you are arguing we currently don't have any inflation, which would be a tough sell :)
Also this last CPI report oil & gas pulled inflation down whereas just about everything else pulled it up. Food is hot, but a lot of other things are as well including non-commodity service based industries.
That all depends on the timeframe you’re looking at. The Bitcoin I bought (not nearly enough of) at under $80 is doing a lot better than any cash I still have from around then.
A year or two from now Bitcoin very well might be back above it’s all time high.
When people are complaining about the declining purchasing power of USD, they are mostly talking about since November 2021, because that's when inflation started to really kick in.
Its ironically, also when BTC really began to collapse from its $60,000 high. So it really demonstrates how much the BTC was benefiting from low-interest rate / inflationary policies.
The 8% figure doesn’t match real life. My electric bill doubled, my natural gas bill doubled, my municipal bill doubled, my groceries doubled.Everything that makes up the vast majority of my expenditures had doubled.
You could be the guy where it's only raining above his house, but the people you are having this conversation with also live in the world and disagree with your figures as much as the statistics do.
Ignoring the fact that you’re implying a 100% USD inflation over the past year, you’d only have 25% of the purchasing power if you “invested” in BTC per the GPs example.
Yes. And eggs are the highest increase on that list, at 38%—still a far cry from 100%. Comparatively, fresh fruits are down 0.8%, and fresh veggies up only 0.8%.
IIRC the giant flats of Costco eggs went up to 3-4x their former price over the last year or so. Still a great deal, they're just not "holy shit that's practically free!" like before.
Weird. Eggs by the dozen (along with onions, one of the most volatile staples at the grocery store) are up only like 75% for me. Admittedly that's a lot and more than I had expected when I went and checked but I'm still seeing very different numbers.
I'm not sure other eggs are up as much as those large-flat Costco ones (60 eggs? Something like that). I have a feeling they were losing money on them before, they were so cheap.
Meanwhile pork and chicken are roughly the same as they've always been where I am, at least ignoring sale pricing.
Hell, I got 3.5 pounds of steak tips for $20 about a month ago.
My food costs have absolutely gone up, but it's MUCH closer to the "10 percent" figures quoted as inflation than anything close to what you have said. Where do you live and shop?
> I got 3.5 pounds of steak tips for $20 about a month ago.
A lot of cattle was recently liquidated (made into meat products, this year) as grazing fields have been drying up and, due to climate change, meat pipelines have had to start making MAJOR changes.
So of the two items you cherry-picked to support an assertion that groceries have more than doubled, one is up...around 30-35%. In fact, there doesn't appear to be a single food item in this list that has doubled in the past year. Eggs are the closest.
But that's not the whole story. Prices are not primarily set by wholesale costs for many goods.
I think cereal has only gone up 30%, although there have been other events that influenced Kellogs pricing (notice how the Poptarts boxes have changed slightly) and then there has been the opportunity to steal away some extra profit - https://www.wxyz.com/news/now-cereal-prices-are-on-the-rise-... (search for "Mills").
People are unable to distinguish "prices have gone up from money printing" from "prices have gone up due to the pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine". Neither bitcoin nor gold can hedge against the latter.
Which is mostly driven by putting trillions of dollars into the economy. The Fed had 1 trillion on it's books during the 07 recession. It has 8 trillion on it's books now. That's a major problem.
Yeah, its up like 100% over Bitcoin and like +30% over Euro, Yen, and GBP? In fact, holding Cash/USD has been basically one of the best performing things in my entire portfolio this year (after oil/energy)
Have _you_ seen BTC's buying power recently?