I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's flake chocolates stuck in the side and they seemed like the closest thing to heaven on earth to me. What my dad said seemed logical though and I saved. When I was 16 I had a holiday job that earned me many ice-cream-worths but I kept it - didn't buy a bicycle or anything. "Save your money."
These were Zimbabwe dollars, however, and in the late 1990s it all inflated away to nothing. So much for conscientious saving.
As a childhood lesson you don't need crazy inflation for this to hold true though. Anything that takes more than a few of months to save up to just doesn't make sense as a kid. Your disposable income goes up by factors of ten every few years. You have 2$ to spend at 5, 20$ at 10, 200$ at 15. Then it slows down but you might still get to 2000$ at 25.
Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.
It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.
Sure, saving money isn't the best strategy, but it sure beats "spend every dime the minute you get it" which is what children are naturally inclined to do. Teaching kids to save money is the first step towards financial literacy.
It is a bad step as it is usually taught, though (that is, as and end goal itself rather than, for example, as a means to better investments). Any astute kid is going to look at the “compound interest” argument as laughable. It only works if there is sustained, substantial additional contributions over a lifetime. This is especially true for people in lower income brackets. Try convincing a kid with even modest arithmetic skills that saving $2 (or $20, or even $200) and letting it compound is “smart.”
> It only works if there is sustained, substantial additional contributions over a lifetime.
That's literally how I was taught about compound interest: saving money means making weekly/monthly/annual contributions. And that was a regular (non-honors) class in an inner-city middle school.
> Try convincing a kid with even modest arithmetic skills that saving $2 and letting it compound is “smart.”
No, that's idiotic. I think you're beating on a straw man.
And what, it's down, adjusted for inflation, 40% on a 1-year basis while the dollar is down 8.5%. Literally the worst inflation hedge. If you'd bought US Series I savings bonds you'd be dead flat in real dollar terms. That's an inflation hedge.
> If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.
Except when you don't.
Between 1995 and 2000 I lived in a student house in the UK and one of my housemates (who was also a student, and from my recollection almost as broke as I was back then) was really into investing into the stock market during the dot-com boom.
He bought both Lastminute.com (IPO March 2000 @ 380p/share[1], sold to Travelocity in 2005 @ 165p/share[2]) and Railtrack (IPO 1996[3], went bankrupt 2001[4])
Well, you don't buy individual stocks; you buy slices of slices of everything to dissipate your risk towards variance. And you definitely don't hold cash. Holding cash has a lot of risk as well
One of the many, we indians experienced few years ago, where the prime minister simply announced on national tv that from tonight 8pm onwards two denominations (the highest ones at the time) are not valid anymore. I think he gave few/20 weeks to deposit old notes to banks.
One of many, the housewives who saved money from day to day house expenses, had to come out clean to family that they are holding 1000s of currency in old now defunct notes.
I think the official figure is, more that 99% of old money was presented to banks for conversion; but this might spill into a political or controversial conversation, I will not be pursuing it because of lack of energy.
Risk of loss, theft or physical degradation. Then there’s the costs of holding cash, which are known to give you a negative yield due to inflation (nevermind bank fees or insurance costs, etc)
I assume cash was being used in the normal financial accounting sense of the word as opposed to dollar bills in the mattress.
Yes, there's inflation negative yield. But especially in the low interest and inflation rate environment that has been the case until possibly recently, the difference between "cash" (i.e. default investment at a brokerage) and other very low-risk investments (e.g. high quality corporate bonds) has been pretty minimal.
There are degrees to it. Slices of all mortgages are less risky than a single mortgage. Slices of all tech stocks are less risky than individual tech stocks. Slices of all American stocks is less risky than slices of one industry in America. And slices of all equities trades across the world is less risky than slices of America
I’d suggest that for most people, buying diversified index funds are a more appropriate strategy.
Nothing you do in life is risk free, even keeping cash under your mattress: the fact that there is risk involved does not change that this is how you make money. When you know that you’re guaranteed a loss of ~2%, at best, on cash, and that your expected real return on stocks is positive, well… That’s the point.
> I’d suggest that for most people, buying diversified index funds are a more appropriate strategy
At least in the UK, buying into index funds was substantially more expensive back then. I held shares in a retail bank for a time not long after that, for which I had an actual paper certificate! No wonder trading was expensive....
The problem with an example like this is that a (hypothetical) friend of yours could have bought into Apple or Amazon or MSFT back then and had a ton of money now :) .
I was about to suggest index funds but looks like the FTSE-100 has been sh$t for the last 22 years, too (~10 percent
total return). No luck there for your friend even if he had invested in index funds :(
I'm afraid you've mixed up "price return" (as in the change in the level of the index - ~6200 in April 2000 to ~7600 in April 2022. (Which is a 22.5% total return)) with "total return" (as in the return when you include dividend payouts - 170% in total, or 4.6% annualized)
Because most of people can only do that. So saving small amounts of money to build up some buffer.
When you have a buffer only then you can start buying assets.
Until web brokers started I did not even know how to buy stocks. I think most people still don't know how to buy stocks unless they are from really well-off family.
My parents were also not "financially literate" so I had to figure out all kind of stuff on my own.
Downside was for example that I got supper shitty "investment product" so I did not loos much money but if I knew better I would put my money in a better place.
Fortunately I did not get outright scammed but for a lot of people that have to learn as they go it is a real risk so "just saving" and losing some value to inflation might be best option for many.
> Until web brokers started I did not even know how to buy stocks. My parents were also not "financially literate" so I had to figure out all kind of stuff on my own.
I mean, liquid asset vs variable and tied up asset?
I'll be the first to admit to being fiscally conservative: money I can't spend and that is sunk into something else does not guarantee that I get my money back.
I'm losing money on the savings I have every year, which is why I put nearly all my savings into a fund, but then that fund dropped in value almost immediately by 30%, if I had done nothing with my money and bought a top of the line MacBook Pro with 64G of ram, I would have more "money" than I have today; but it all depends on what the value is when I sell out of the fund, there's no guarantee that I'll even get what it currently says I "have" back either.
I don't understand the mindset that losses aren't real until you convert them back into cash. If you had turned your money into casino chips and were sitting at a poker table, and had just lost 30% of your chips, would you consider that your losses weren't real until you cashed out your chips? Of course, you might win your money back, and if you were a good poker player who usually came up net-positive from situations like this, you'd be well advised to keep playing.
I'm not giving you financial advice - I don't know anything about you or your investment. It just seems fundamentally wrong to me to consider different forms of money (cash, shares of an investment fund, casino chips, etc) as being distinct. Changing forms may have tax implications but it's not like the form protects you from loses in some way. If you keep your money in an underperforming investment it should be because you expect it to go up in the future, not because you are afraid of realizing a loss (which you have already suffered).
It’s not the same: in your example with casino chips, each game you play is a bet, it’s more akin to buying and selling a stock each time. You realize your gains/losses each turn.
A better analogy is stocks vs Real Estate. Let’s say you buy a home for 200k, and sell it later for 300k. Every day in between, when you “weren’t in the market”, the potential value of your home fluctuated: it’s entirely possible that halfway in between, the top bid on that day, were it listed on the market, would have been for 6$.
Of course in reality you don’t see all these intermediate hypothetical prices, but in theory they’re there just the same as if you bought stocks and then didn’t look at prices for 10 years.
The fact that there is a price on the open market (the fluctuation of which determines your unrealized gain/loss) does not obligate you to sell at any particular moment: that’s just like owning a home and not caring how much someone would pay for it on Tuesday vs Wednesday because you don’t intend to sell it in the first place.
Real estate is the same as my casino example. If the price of your house changes year to year then your networth changes with it. You might not care, or even know, about the changing price because you have no intention of selling your house, but that doesn't change the reality of your fluctuating networth.
The typical advice is that timing the market is so hard that we’re usually better off just riding out volatility. JP Morgan observed that about 40% of gains between 1995 and 2015 came on the market’s ten best days, many of which came within two weeks of the ten worst days.
I'm not quite sure what your point is here; you are making several different arguments that don't really make sense.
> I don't understand the mindset that losses aren't real until you convert them back into cash.
stocks, cash, real estate, etc are all assets, but they behave very differently. in particular, there are some very special attributes to cash: it can be directly exchanged for almost any other type of asset, and the prices of those assets are almost always denominated in cash. simple example: my lease says I owe $1000 each month in rent, not $1000 worth of any asset, but cash specifically. if I have $10k in cash, I can definitely pay rent for the next ten months. if I have $10k worth of some s&p 500 ETF, I a) can't pay rent without converting to cash first and b) risk being forced to sell at a time when my shares are worth less than $10k. I have a good chance of making rent for roughly 10 months, but there's a lot more that could go wrong. of course, cash itself does fluctuate in value just like other assets, but we are mostly insulated from that in the short term by the fact that most legal agreements are denominated in nominal dollars, and that the prices of most material things are much stickier than financial instruments. in short, this is why the concept of unrealized vs realized gains/losses makes a useful distinction.
> It just seems fundamentally wrong to me to consider different forms of money (cash, shares of an investment fund, casino chips, etc) as being distinct. Changing forms may have tax implications but it's not like the form protects you from loses in some way.
nothing is 100%, but different assets have sufficiently different risk profiles that it's worth distinguishing between them. cash is an extremely safe asset in the short term, but almost guarantees a loss in the long term. if you can identify buckets of money that you probably won't need for a long time, it has historically been a good bet to invest them in bonds/stocks/whatever based on your tolerance for risk. it doesn't guarantee a good outcome, but it avoids the guaranteed bad outcome of holding a lot of cash for a long time.
> If you keep your money in an underperforming investment it should be because you expect it to go up in the future, not because you are afraid of realizing a loss (which you have already suffered).
agreed, and this is a common mistake that people make. but this is more people applying the sunk cost fallacy to the concept of unrealized vs realized than an issue with the concept itself.
Banks can fail. Stocks can fail. Currencies can fail. I'm not saying it makes sense on the whole to bury your worth in cash. But there is an amount of paranoia that confuses things.
The interest in my savings account is laughable. It's marginally better than keeping in a mattress.
The mattress doesn't charge bullshit fees. The mattress doesn't arrest you for being the wrong color.
If you’re in the west. A major bank failing and Govt + insurance not covering the losses for customers means something we have not encountered as a modern society. That’s as close to a break down of modern society as you can get. Sure it’s possible. Cash will def be great then. However this is such an extreme situation that there’s no way to know what will be good in that situation.
I would think in a situation like that, we would have something similar to what happened to job losses and the stock market cratering like in March and April 2020. Except that cratering and job losses would continue while riots and protests all across would get bigger and bigger. Crime presumably would go up a lot too.
It slips out that your family has $20K in cash at your home…who knows what’ll happen in this dystopian situation.
In case of the banking system collapsing in a modern developed country? That’s such an extreme situation I’m not sure if holding cash would be the right hedge against it. That sounds more like a canned food and flour bags kind of time.
If a bank fails, the deposit insurance also fails and the government can’t step in either that will undercut the trust in all other banks too. I would expect a chain reaction of follow-on bank collapses and hyper-inflation.
'you’re in the west. A major bank failing and Govt + insurance not covering the losses for customers means something we have not encountered as a modern society.'
It's a common occurence u developing countries, people hedge against it by holding foreign currencies and tangiable assets like land. Its not that rare for people to live through multiple devaluations and currency collapses. Ofcourse you don't go around telling people about tour wealth
As krisoft said. In such an unprecedented and extreme situation, foreign currencies would likely not mean much either. The world is globalized. America defaulting on such a huge thing would likely bring down most of the world’s economies and currencies. Possibly some isolated countries would fare better. They’d still be effected like crazy too, but they’d be something.
Yes assets like land would help. However with banks failing like this, someone with more guns and aggression than you or I could come to our homes and take them from us in areas where LEO are not being paid and thus not doing anything.
With the failing banks and such, tracking down who owns what will be much more difficult when things get better. Changing failing bank documents can’t be the hardest thing in this situation.
> If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.
"Win at life" == "save money" == "owning stocks" ???
Winning at life is about everything that is not about money. Winning at life is being able to be happy no matter how much or how little money you have. Sure, up until one point, more money can help you get happier, but if you don't have the baseline happiness, you will never become happy and "win at life" no matter what. And up until a certain point, not even more money can make you happier if you're already miserable.
I believe you’re doing what is called an equivocation? (edit: not sure exactly what it’s called, but you’re arguing against something I did not say or mean)
We’re talking about money, in a thread about money, on a post about money. At no point did I suggest that money makes unhappy people happy.
And I think you did not mean "win at life" in as broad a sense as the other person interpreted it. Either that or you two have very different ideas of what "winning at life" could mean.
Money is a representation of energy. If you used it like you would electricity you would be better off. Sure, store some in batteries but know that they dissipate over time. Stocks should only be purchased when you want to literally invest in a company or industry because you think it has major growth potential, not for speculation. Non-cash assets could also mean precious metals as they have conversion power over any fiat currency. As we're watching the neo-liberal global world order collapse with the war in Russia I think gold and silver will win out over any other non-cash asset. However it still doesn't make any money. The way to make money with money is to buy things that appreciate in value over time. Real estate is one of the most available things that fit this category. My parents bought a house in Florida last year at the "top of the market" and their property is now worth about 20% more. And if they rented it out they could recuperate some of the capital outlay that they invested.
> As we're watching the neo-liberal global world order collapse with the war in Russia
How do you imagine that happening? Does it look like to you that the west is going to loose so bad that all the investments loose their value? Or you are banking on a nuclear winter?
> you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks
Bonds aren’t great for building wealth. But they’re fine for preserving it. Saving money via a mix of inflation-indexed and fixed-yield debt will generally preserve your purchasing power over long time intervals.
While that has been true for the US the past ~250 years, the US are to some extent an anomaly.
Most of the world has seen bond owners get eaten almost completely really. Almost all of Africa, large swathes of Asia, much of Europe including Germany and Russia, most of South America...
> all of Africa, large swathes of Asia, much of Europe including Germany and Russia, most of South America
Were any of these seen, contemporaneously, as low-risk?
The backfire sovereigns in the last 100 years were limited to Austria-Hungary and the Dutch, trading economies derailed by war. The others aren’t trading nations, or were well-established basket cases when they issued their debt.
There should be a giant disclaimer, this somewhat true for inflation indexed bonds, if you can hold bonds to the maturity date. If not, all bets are off.
I hope I did not come across as that out of touch.
The reality is, most people barely can meet their basic needs. If you hate that as much as I do, then vote for politicians that care about wealth inequality.
Depends how much money and for how long. Saving dollar bills for a coffee maker rather than buying a cup of Starbucks is a good start if that's your current station in life. If the market takes a dive and you don't have cash equivalents, you have to sell at a loss to cover your living expenses and can't buy more stock to capitalize on eventual recovery. Maybe a credit union checking account that pays a little interest is not so bad for someone with limited time / knowledge to manage too many types of assets?
I haven't read the book, but is the premise that asset price movements form a random walk? (They don't, and hearing it said that they do is probably my nerdiest pet peeve.)
The book really impresses upon the reader the difficulties of beating the market, and indeed talks a lot about random walks, but mostly it's about the efficient market hypothesis.
I should say that I also don't think this is the best description of how prices actually move, and over the years since I've read the book, I have come to no longer believe in the EMH. That being said, I do still think pointing people in this direction in general is the best thing I can do: even though these ideas will only take you so far, they remain academically productive, interesting, and useful... And most people would do better to approach the markets with more humility and less confidence. Those who are nerd enough to go beyond the EMH will undoubtedly do so on their own and at their own peril. :)
The book is very much in the tradition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, Warren Buffett's value investing style, etc.
While generally true, there's the problem of what to buy and when. Then there's the problem of hindsight and the problem of that one stock everyone thought was going to the moon crashing and burning away your life savings. Then there are strategies and strategies that decide which strategy to apply and when, then you realize it isn't as easy as "just buy stonks".
It is more complicated, but the rule of "if you are more than 10 years from retirement, buy VTI when you have available money" works well for an absolutely huge number of people. You can optimize things, but there are effective strategies that fit on note cards.
The fact that it’s more complicated, or difficult, than the treatment I gave the subject in a passing comment doesn’t change the fact that it’s true generally speaking.
Well, if you are not a professional investor, you'd better stick to savings accounts or invest in a index but not in individual assets. Investing as a non-professional is akin to doing surgery on you own body while not being a surgeon.
I think a particularly determined and curious non-professional can reasonably expect to be successful at stock picking, but yes, for the vast majority of folks, I agree.
The strategy you suggest is clearly good, but the percentage of people who can afford to think beyond ‘if the car breaks down I need some money’ and imagine a retirement is probably smaller than we both think.
But it's a lesson in the same category as "You'd better learn how to do equations on paper and long form because you won't always have a calculator with you." If the underpinning is obvious bunk, it does nothing to reinforce the desired behavior and can in fact be counterproductive.
The reason to do long form math on paper is to get a feeling for the mechanics of math so that you can extrapolate it to more complicated math. The reason to save is that there are minimum barriers to cost for investiture in capital, and capital pays dividends and grows in a way consumables don't (unless it doesn't! Nobody wins in a civil war).
In many rpgs as you progress through the game the need for expenditure diminishes to zero. Different case if it is mmo or designed around grinding though.
> even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.
What if it never makes sense?
One thing I didn't realize until embarrassingly too late in life is that savings should only function as a buffer for emergencies. Anything else is just burning your money since there haven't been savings accounts that consistently beat inflation even in the US.
I was fed these same myths as a kid, and earnestly believed that part of success in life was to have a huge savings account one day. I remember well all those "power of compound interest" talks in grade school, about how working hard and saving was the path to wealth. But that's all a complete myth.
The real irony is that anyone who has built themselves serious amounts of wealth typically does so by making high risk/high reward choices. Teaching kids to play it safe and building saves, different desires to the future etc. doesn't make any sense in the world we live in. It's ultimately bad advice. No one I know who ended up very successful did so by living conservatively and within they're means. They're people who aggressively pursued improving their conditions, often times because they were forced too precisely because they didn't have a savings.
The lesson of "save money, life within your means and make conservative choices" sounds nice, but in the world we live in today this is a recipe for short terms austerity and long term decline.
> that anyone who has built themselves serious amounts of wealth typically does so by making high risk/high reward choices.
You have the logic backward. If it was "typically, anyone who made high risk/high reward choices has built themselves serious amounts of wealth", it would be good advice, but what if most of those people failed terribly? An example is pursuing a career as an artist/sportsman which are common high risk/high reward aspirations of children which most people fail at.
I also had that same late lesson in saving being useless. Luckily, I learnt it by buying a house which appreciated fast and showed what a disaster savings would have been.
> Luckily, I learnt it by buying a house which appreciated fast and showed what a disaster savings would have been.
The better way to learn this is to be able to look at a graph like this: https://inflationchart.com/spx-in-m3 understand it, and make an informed decision taking in to account your personal risk tolerance.
> No one I know who ended up very successful did so by living conservatively and within they're means. They're people who aggressively pursued improving their conditions, often times because they were forced too precisely because they didn't have a savings.
This also seems like bad advice. You can aggressively pursue higher earnings and simultaneously spend conservatively (on anything that does not contribute directly to higher earnings). You seem to be setting up a false dichotomy.
That said, I agree that at least in free market economies, high risk / high reward + tremendous luck is a requirement for extreme wealth generation.
I don't think people really mean savings accounts when talking about saving money consistently instead of spending it as an adult. Same goes for compound interest. Regardless, even just putting it in a savings account surely is not "burning your money" if the alternative, spending it directly, brings little utility.
I knew a guy who had saved his way to millionaire status when he retired. His salary was in the high 5 figures. He never bought anything, lived like a hermit, and just socked it all away in a savings account (back when savings accounts earned decent interest).
Kind of an extreme way to live but it used to be possible.
Learning to manage money includes making correct decisions about whether a course of action is worth it. Forcing a child to save when he'd be better off not saving teaches the right lesson about what saving is, and the wrong lesson about when you should save.
Not saving comes natural to most people. Learning to save is the hard part. Most children don't ever make enough money that saving would make financial sense. The reality is, teaching kids to save their money is more a lesson in delayed gratification than it is a financial lesson.
We put our children's savings (money for good school results, birthday money, eid money, etc.) into 3 separate envelops, equally: SPEND, SAVE, CHARITY.
SPEND:
They are encouraged to spend 1/3rd of the money. Whatever they want to buy. They have become online discount shopping experts, whether getting rubiks cubes, roller blades or harry potter merchandise.
SAVE:
1/3rd goes into savings, which we will let them tap once they need it. Not sure when: once they are 17/18 perhaps? In all cases, it will be a big payout compared to the amounts they are used to "spend".
CHARITY:
And 1/3rd goes to charity envelop. So whenever an opportunity comes up, they can use that towards any charity event. Good thing is that they usually spend it all in one go. Great!
I guess this is the type of modelling CNBC used for millenial spending in their infamous tweet[0]; I don't know many people that actually donate >10% of their income to charity.
What you want to do is set up a charity in a Third World country and give them a steady stream of money that goes to the governmental leaders for their own personal projects, like a school or something. Do this for a few years and then you're positioned to get control of the country's natural resources at well-below market prices due to, ah, corrupt local leaders willing to sell out their country's interests in exchange for more 'charity'.
I like that this balances out the usual puritanical "must save at all costs" attitude. I feel my family was way in that direction due to circumstances (own a place to live with zero property tax, but very little pension/income). But now even though I do well for myself, I end up doing illogical things like never using an unopened set of oil paints. I feel that teaching to spend money/resources is also important (I could have used it at the very least!).
Nice given the time frame do you plan on further dividing save into save/invest at some point? In other words is the big payout coming only by the total amount saved + interest or by potentially greater returns through something like an index fund?
IMHO the saving you do as an adult is a very different kind of activity from the saving you learn to do as a child. Saving as a child is more about delaying gratification by not acting on one's desires; saving well as an adult is more about taking action by making prudent financial decisions. I'm not sure if learning the former really helps you much with learning the latter, though it is a useful lesson in its own right.
Even among people who seem financially stable, I've been surprised how many of my peers spend money as soon as they see it and have never had more than $X000 at the same time ever. The lesson of delayed gratification is actually a pretty big factor in being able to save up money as an adult.
Perhaps we're getting a lot of that lesson from games like Royale High in Roblox. I was amazed at what a detailed budget/spending plan the kid wrote up in her journal for all the things she was hoping to buy for the in-game currency. And how many days it would take her to save up for it. Oh well, at least the inflation or opportunity loss from not investing is not as much of a factor there.
Wish I had this logic when I was 16 and working my awful minimum wage jobs. Sure, that money ended up in an IRA eventually, but $1k gets made much faster as a software engineer than it does frying chicken wings for minimum wage, to the point where the trade off from having a bit of fun in high school or college would vastly outweigh the small gains I made.
I remember thinking my friends and peers were wasteful for spending their earned money on a new graphics card or even buying a $2 drink when they stopped at the gas station instead of saving what was required for necessary expenses, setting aside a little bit for fun, and saving everything else. Turns out I was the fool.
I am happy for that habit of saving, but I wish I had more perspective and reduced my savings rate to focus on having a buffer instead of saving for retirement at 16. I guess that's what growing up is for.
Was your future as a software engineer guaranteed when you were a kid? :)
Personally, I never would have had an opportunity to go for a high paying job if I hadn't saved up a lot of money at a time when I was earning little. So not only was a high paying future not a sure thing, it was probably only possible because I didn't act as though it were.
It's easy to take for granted all the luck and skill that our past selves benefited from, making past caution seem foolish in hindsight. Seldom was it actually guaranteed.
Isn't the "go up by a factor of ten" pattern you describe more of your parents spending behaviors (until you are old enough to get odd jobs by yourself) than anything else?
The concept of "save money and put your loose change coins into a piggy bank" could be much older than how much disposable income kids[1] today have. My hypothesis: Maybe the intended lesson was more coherent with the reality a century ago.
Here is the first graph I found with a search engine of USD purchasing power: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1032048/value-us-dollar-... . After the Napoleonic wars until WW2 or so the purchasing power of 1 U.S. dollar spend most of its time increasing followed by sudden drastic drops in value during ... the Civil War and WW1.
>Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.
Also saving during 20s for this reason - if you're just starting out in a career and expecting your income to rise rapidly the money you save on interest is going to be irrelevant.
It's pretty universal as a kid, as someone in their 20s? Much less so. Sure, if you're getting a degree in CS and will land a 150k a year job soon, saving anything significant from your $14 an hour parttime job as a student makes little sense. But I was making $50k in my late twenties and was not going to jump in income significantly, I saved quite a bit and was able to buy a house and later stocks which have appreciated a few hundred thousand since then. Now starting my 30s with around $80k salary. Saving is a lot easier now, but the housing market got a lot harder, too. Inflation-adjusted I don't even make that much more. But with the few hundred thousand equity, at a 7% annual return my retirement at age 65 could be reasonably locked in at >$3 million, even without saving an extra penny. Saving in my 20s made a big difference. Outside of a few fields like tech, most people don't see crazy income growth to not have to bother with saving/investing in their 20s.
That's great - but did this saving involve sacrificing on experiences you've had ? Setting yourself up for retirement at age 20 sounds like a miserly life.
It's generalizing of course, but I've noticed this in friends I grew up with. They had avoid debt mentality, saved a bunch of money compared to their income, etc. The money they saved up didn't really enable anything significant, and they had to miss out on a bunch of stuff to make the budget.
Now we're in our mid 30s they have a bit of money stashed up, still single, still trying to figure out what they want in life. I've paid off the debt I've racked up in 20s, make considerably more than them (in no small part thanks to the more risk taking behavior) and the experiences I've had helped me move forward in life.
You only get to go through youth once, even if you have millions in 40s-50s it won't make you young again. You'll be making money your entire life.
Depending upon a rapid rise of income is a very good way to wind up buried in debt at the slightest complication makes it not come when expected. There are a few times when it can work like say medical school's debt stack.
Saving in my twenties gave me good returns despite issues starting my career but that involved some exceptional circumstances from getting in on Tesla relatively early.
I liked it (saving and later also investing), I think at one point I even bugged my bank for better rates on my tiny account once I'd figured out how to compute compound interest on my dad's calculator (and realized it was programmable).
Not that I don't need a job anymore, but it did serve me well (the stock market rising continuously for 10 years might have helped too). I definitely wouldn't talk anyone out of it with that sort of reasoning, maybe the only benefit is sparking an interest in math and computers.
The rest of your comment makes sense. I didn’t really start saving until my late 20’s. It just made waaaay more sense to invest any disposable income in myself.
So far so good. Thanks to those early investments in myself I’ve been able to save more in the past ~5 years of my career than my cumulative earnings of the first 10 years.
Time preference is a big component in life success. There's not a lot of practical ways to discuss this with a small child, so "save up for the bigger/better toy" is what you get. If you have better ways to teach this lesson to your kids, I highly recommend doing it.
As an adult, 'wait a year' is quite reasonable, but kids live in dog years, when i was a kid 'wait a month' felt like i have to wait untill i grow old and get reincarnated
Start with shorter time horizons. Do your kids earn an allowance? Pay them interest. Every dollar they still have at the end of the week, give them a dime. Be creative.
It’d make more sense if your parents directed your savings to the stock market or in some other asset. Saving by itself is worthless if you can’t put the money to work.
Saving for a (an achievable) goal is though. I bought stuff that I had to save for as a teenager that I still have and use. (Speakers & AVR come to mind.)
I agree about the sort of 'goalless' saving that I do now though.
Funny side note: the State of Illinois spent a decent amount of public funds trying to decide whether to charge me with $100 trillion in currency fraud. The state crime lab said the currency I owned was the "most sophisticated piece of currency forgery" they had ever encountered.
It was a single (real) $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe that I carried in my wallet for fun. I assume they thought for some reason it was US dollars?
I bought a couple of those and got them framed as a gift. The owner of the frame shop was concerned about me leaving them with him, until I pointed out that I was going to pay him more for the frame than they were worth.
I don't know how much they sell for now, but I was lucky to get one for $20 when they were normally going for $40 on eBay.
I forgot the exact result, but I once calculated the value of a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill when it was printed, and it came to something like 0.06 USD (6 cents).
I just checked ebay. Real ones sell for $100-200 US.
There are also fakes, most of which admit in the description that they are fakes, and include extremely large numbers like 10^33.
The highest number that you can get cheaply and that is not fake seems to be the 50 billion. They sell for about five dollars, which given the economics of ebay is probably as low as you can expect.
They didn't give it back. I'll have to give them a call. This was 8 years ago, but I know they still have it. I didn't know they'd gone up so much in value. I don't think I'd want to sell it though. I remember paying about $10 + shipping for it.
That sounds insane. Did no one just do a quick Google search and see that you can buy them all day long all over the internet? I think we need some more details on why they were going through your wallet and how and why they even considered a charge in this case.
I was arrested for something totally unrelated. It was only later my lawyer showed me a piece of paper one day titled 'ILLINOIS STATE CRIME LAB' which detailed the analysis they had done. There were like 9 factors they analyze fake currency on (e.g. paper, ink, metal strip, holograms, hidden dots, etc) and my bill matched for 8 of the 9, which is what prompted the comment about it being such a sophisticated fake, I guess.
I'll try and get a copy. This was 8 years ago, but the lab will probably still have a copy. I felt like Dr Evil... one hundred trillion! All I could think of was this skit:
I did the same thing for many years, until in 2013 the Cyprus bailouts woke me up...at that point I went all in on Bitcoin out of anger of the banking system, and haven't changed anything since.
I hope this works out for you in the long term; BTC isn't the most stable platform, but it could certainly be more stable than some national currencies.
If you don't look at the price, it's the most stable and predictable service and protocol in the existence of the internet (maybe after the internet / IPv4). It's uptime is 99.987%, last time it was down in 2013, and the cool thing is that even if it gets down, it has self healing property in the case of network separation / sybil attack.
I dare you to find another internet service (or even banking service) with the same stability.
Also the same software that I downloaded in 2013 still works (although I'm not using it, I have the option to not upgrade).
There was a bail in last month in my country (Hungary) as well: all people who stored their money in Russian banks lost their money over $100000, just like in Cyprus in 2013. They did't even know that their bank was Russian owned. I'm not playing the game of russian roulette with my money anymore.
Well, I've had BTC transactions drop out of the mempool (so, they were not executed, but you don't know that immediately, you only know days later), and transactions that worked took between a few minutes and more than half a day. The fees ranged from virtually nothing to around 50 USD. I certainly would not call that predictable and stable. I mean, you don't even know when the next block will arrive.
I would be suprised if a valid normal transaction with 50 USD would drop out of a mempool. What was the transaction weight? If you send the transaction data, I would be interested to look at it.
I'm usually overpaying (20 satoshis/byte, usually under $1 for a $2000 transaction), and I always get into the first block, but I never pay $50 fee.
Yes, this is true, I'm mostly worried about the elliptic curve signature part, as everything else could be fixed with an emergency hard fork (except SHA256).
Sadly OP_CAT operation is disabled (or substring equality operation), which would make lamport signatures available again for high value transactions. I would love it if lamport signatures would be enabled again (it would be quite easy to do), but I'm afraid that there isn't enough concensus to do it at this point, because some people would think that it's wasteful, and also lamport signatures are dangerous, as they can be used only once.
Bitcoin is an unbelievably stable platform with an uptime of 99.98% with only 13 years to draw from. It's been sticking with it's algorithmically defined inflation rate with perfect predictability, unlike any other currency or scarce asset like gold, which depends heavily on incentives to mine and accessible reserves.
Don't mistake the volatility of the USD price of bitcoin (which is based on the erratic, unpredictability of human emotions and massively distrusted market decision making) with the complete and utter lack of volatility of the actual underlying system.
Inflation (at least in it's common usage) tracks the price of goods, not the supply of currency. While those traditionally affect each other strongly you cannot say that bitcoin has a stable or well defined inflation/deflation curve because the price of goods denoted in bitcoin are extremely volatile.
You can say that the monetary supply is very predictable, but that doesn't do much good if the price of goods fluctuate.
The word is 'inflation' is overloaded to mean both depending on the context.
It can mean inflation of the price of things, which may be driven by supply constraints OR demand changes OR currency debasement. This is notoriously difficult to calculate a single value for, because all goods and services can oscillate wildly in prices in both direction. Electronics and mass produced things are a strongly deflationary good because they're constantly becoming less scarce while food, education, health care, and housing are significantly inflationary in price, because they're not getting less scarce at faster than demand.
It's impossible to give single CPI style inflation number that isn't deceptive in some way, because to do so, you have to put every person in a box and declare a "standard" basket of goods that everyone is expected to consume. But reality is messy, so my basket of good is likely going to be quite different from yours. Everything from diets, the types of education and housing we choose, the transportation choices available to us, our reproductive choices, and the hobbies we pursue can be radically different, which can mean that your "true price inflation" can be radically different from my "true price inflation" and both radically different from official and heavily manipulated government CPI numbers.
Inflation can also mean the inflation of the currency supply. This is the more traditional definition, and it gives a simpler way to understand whether prices for goods and services are rising because of changes to supply and demand, or if the prices of goods are rising because there's suddenly a lot more units of currency available to chase those scare real things. And of course, when it becomes clear that it's the currency getting rapidly debased, people start hoarding the actually scarce goods and resources, because the money is becoming toilet paper, and that's bad for all of us, because hoarding scarce real world resources that we don't need right now is bad for all of civilization.
In this sentence traditional can either mean "old" or "common". If you meant "old", then I agree, but currently it is not the more common one.
For the sake of clarity, if you only meant the more narrow definition of currency supply inflation in you parent comment then it's probably good to say so.
Saying that bitcoin has a stable algorithmically defined inflation rate is a hilarious redefinition of terms. Over the last year, one Bitcoin lost approximately 40% of its purchasing power relative to a basket of consumer goods and services. The year before, the opposite happened with bitcoin increasing in purchasing power by a factor of 5-10x.
,,A historical look at the origin and uses of the word inflation, arguing that although the term has become nearly synonymous with "price increase," its original meaning - a rise in the general price level caused by an imbalance between the quantity of money and trade needs - is the definition driving many of those who advocate an anti-inflation policy for the Federal Reserve.''
Austrian economics still uses the original meaning of inflation (increase in monetary supply), while Keynsian economics uses the change in consumer price index, or more broadly the change in prices.
I prefer to always distinguish the two by writing monetary supply inflation and price inflation instead of just writing inflation, as this conflict between definitions always comes up.
The mathematical certainty of the issuance of BTC won't really mean much if nobody wants to trade it for goods. BTC's volatility is not just volatility w.r.t. USD.
The value of anything as a medium of exchange and store of value always depends entirely on whether or not a critical mass of people want to use it as such. Once you establish that a thing satisfies all the properties of money, or close enough, then the only question is network effect. Even if minor theoretical improvements could be made, it has to be 10-100x better to overcome runaway network effect.
Sea shells and bags of salt were drastically better money than mentally keeping track of favors owed in a small tribe, because we could expand our exchange of favors beyond dunbar's number to cooperate with people we don't intimately know. Gold was much better than sea shells and salt because it's globally scarce and durable. Paper backed by gold was much better than raw gold, namely because it is drastically easier to trade, transport, and fractionalized.
The technical nature of bitcoin isn't special and it can be trivially forked, modified, and a new network started for near zero cost. That's exactly what coins like litecoin and dogecoin did. Copy paste bitcoin code, change the name and some constants, and boom, new money. What makes bitcoin special, and why there can only be one dominant cryptocurrency long term, is network effect. I don't care about litecoin and dogecoin, because barely anyone uses them relative bitcoin. Barely anyone is developing and building on them as a foundational layer. The only reason anyone cares about dogecoin these days is because one eccentric billionaire has a hard on for it, and that's way too small of a bus number to store a significant amount of my wealth in.
The same holds true for any network protocol. I can copy paste libraries for TCP and make modifications that I think will make it far superior to the current form and release it to the world! And nobody except hobbyists will use it because standard TCP has an unassailable network effect. You have to have an extraordinarily compelling reason to change, and even then it will take decades (see IPv4 to v6 transition for example).
The thing about bitcoin, is that it is the first truly digital money. Fiat currencies like the USD have been trying for decades to pretend to be digital, and they'll probably try harder to use blockchains to make it better, but ultimately it's still fundamentally stuck with an analog foundation defended by guns and tight cliques of trusted human gangs, which makes it globally weak relative to bitcoin. That's why bitcoin has a 10-100x advantage over dollars long term. It's natively digital, open, and permissionless from day one.
"BTC will eventually crush dollars" and "BTC is not volatile because 1BTC = 1BTC" are very different claims. Even a bitcoin maximalist should recognize that the value of BTC when trading for good and services has swung dramatically over time. Maybe that will happen less over time but the volatility of BTC w.r.t. USD is an important thing to consider and discuss when talking about its use as currency.
Of course. That's why at the moment I only use it for very long term savings and speculation on the future state of civilization.
You need to hold a bit of your local fiat because that's still the most important thing to have for immediate term purchases. Have enough of that and a fiat based income steam such that you don't have to worry about the short term fluctuations of the market price.
> an analog foundation defended by guns and tight cliques of trusted human gangs
Question: when one exchanges Bitcoin for a real-world good or service, what enforces the good or service be provided? And on the flip-side of that question: if one provides a good or service before Bitcoin payment clears, what guarantees payment?
Look to dark net markets for answers. They have to solve this problem in one of the most adversarial and dangerous environments possible, with zero legal recourses to mediate disputes.
The key thing they do is include a third party in the transaction, usually the market itself, who mediates disputes along with a reputation system for sellers. They mostly do it in a centralized way, where the market holds your payment until the buyer confirms or the seller can prove they held up their end. This is a problem because the market can and often does exit scam, so some do this in a decentralized way with 2 of 3 multisig transactions, where if the buyer and seller have no dispute, they can release the money, but if they do, a third party arbitrator can come in and mediate.
Also, higher layer payment protocols like the lightning network effectively clear instantly and trustlessly, with no need to wait for any block to be mined, and are great for minor value transactions.
Finally, replace bitcoin with gold in your question, and ask why that worked for thousands of years.
> replace bitcoin with gold in your question, and ask why that worked for thousands of years
Guns (well, swords and truncheons before that) and tight cliques of trusted human gangs, mostly. And I think I'd argue the dark net markets work the same way: holding reputation as currency, they provide an incentive for the users not to cheat, but if they cheat, there's no recourse except "Well, guess I'd better find another market." And that's if we discount the few but notable instances of them using actual violence to enforce their norms... Ulbricht of Silk Road got arrested for attempting to put an actual bounty on someone's head.
The blockchain system provides a simple way to very publicly and reliably declare the exchange of meaningful numbers between two pseudonymous identities. Everything else about the market that blockchain exists in is the same grabasstical process that humans have used for exchange of resources throughout all of history.
According to legendary quant Nassim Nicholas Taleb so called cryptocurrencies are so fundamentally volatile that they cannot be considered currencies: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14204
Pff tell me about it. I made the choice of buying real estate instead. My tenant has everything serviced for them. They lost half on the stock market, but fortunately own crypto. Also lost a bit on crypto but they earn plenty. My estate doubled in 10 years and the rent they pay paid for two more properties, but i have to deal with the hassle of fixing pipes and such - all in all i pay in maintenance a month worth of rent, but the stress of calling contractors is too much - sometimes i need to get my arse out of the pool to dial people. Also have to spent few hours total a year. I just cant. Should sell everything and invest in crypto. My Porsche is too boring - need a lambo so it loses value sooner. After all what else can you do other than keep money in the bank. Buy estates and turn highly paid tech serfs into tenants? Hah. Best chase nfts.
My parents encouraged me to save money, but for my birthdays so I could buy a new cool Lego kit. My parents and relatives would chip in on the day, but I would keep count during the year to make sure I was close enough.
Looking back I think that was a good middle ground. At least as a 5-10 year old it was a quite concrete target yet also showed me the benefits of saving money.
I try to teach my kids two lessons around money. One, don't spend all of your money. Save some of it. Basically get in the habit of having some amount of money without feeling the need to spend it. Two, when you do have an amount of money that you're not spending, invest it with broad diversification. That lesson is obviously are more complex one that comes later, but it's a likewise important piece. Both to avoid the money inflating away, but also to avoid conflating the ideas of investment and speculation.
Thanks for sharing. A book “The Psychology of Money” talks about this. How people handle money (successful or not) is very different depending on whether or not they experienced inflation as a child.
Never store your long term savings in a thing that someone who isn't you and never will be you can theoretically print an infinite amount of.
Even if you completely trust the people in charge today, you just can't ever be certain that they'll be in charge forever or that the environment won't change in a way such that they break your trust.
Theft: an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property.
Inflation: a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services.
We’d be able to conclude that “inflation is theft” from noting that inflation is driven by “printing money”, whether paper or credit, and that the benefits illicitly go to those in control of the financial system to the detriment of others — which the other poster would likely characterize as “embezzlement”.
So you proved that person right — at least to people who view the Federal Reserve and large banks as in a self interested cabal.
By embezzling the funds they print, eg giving special access to friends, they engage in theft towards society at large.
> from noting that inflation is driven by “printing money”
It's not. Or it can be, in the case of the linked article referencing Argentine hyperinflation. But what we're seeing right now isn't. The US government does not, as a rule, "print money" to create funds. That happens in the banking system. Like for example the government can sell a bond; existing holders of statically invested dollars (foreign governments who sold stuff here, say) give the federal government a bunch of cash in exchange for the promise of interest paid over time. Now the government spends that money (on a pandemic relief bill, say), putting it into circulation among a different demographic (poorer people and not money market investors) who do different things with it (buy consumer goods). Well, now demand for those consumer goods is higher than it would have been. If you're in a pandemic trying to keep the economy afloat, that's a good thing. But if you overshoot by a bit, then there's too much money for the goods available. Inflation! Despite no money having been created; it just changed hands.
Now do the same thing for a supply shock: if manufacturers scale back production (due to a pandemic) and then can't scale it back up fast enough (chip shortage!) then prices... go up! Inflation again!
Likewise trade goods can create supply shocks too. Maybe some product (Russian petroleum) can't be obtained anymore. Less fuel to go around, but all the existing consumers have the same requirements and start bidding against each other for it. Yup, inflation!
People who repeat this "bitcoin can't inflate because mining" idea are selling you a line, basically. And the proof is, in fact, that crypto has been basically flat vs. traditional currencies at this very moment where we're seeing global inflation. If you could ever see this effect, this would be the time to measure it. And it's not there.
High inflation usually goes hand-in-hand with some degree of corruption that immensely benefits the connected and powerful.
In Venezuela the government implemented exchange rates controls which were much more favorable then market based rates. Those with privilege and connections could purchase dollars at the official rate and then sell them at market rates at 10x what they paid for them. By this method an immense measure of the nations wealth could be expropriated.
Commodities can be siphoned from producers with price controls and then liquidated at market rates. Eventually asset owners can be forced to sell when they can’t produce what is demanded at below market prices.
Those that are close to decision makers can front run markets as the everything degenerates into a command economy.
While not all inflation is theft inflation can facilitate theft on an epic scale. At some point all economic and political power shifts to those that benefit from inflation and it becomes politically impossible to “fix” inflation as power derived from it.
Inflation benefits debtors while it penalizes savers but the poorest segment of society is neither savers (as they have no disposable income) or debtors (as nobody will lend to them) and are hurt the most from inflation.
A high net worth individual may lose expected future income due to inflation but someone that is poor may not eat today because of inflation.
Eventually when inflation gets bad enough and real rates are negative producers will simply sit on commodities rather then distribute them. Leaving the oil in the ground maybe a better looking term wealth preservation strategy then pumping and selling the oil.
I don’t disagree that it’s not, by definition, theft. It is, however, an obscured tax on savers, a transfer of wealth from lender to debtor. At least in the US inflation is the result of decoupling dollars from gold and the direct theft of gold and silver from the citizens by the government.
It’s a tax on people holding the currency not all savers. Hold stock, a different currency, copper, paintings etc and you avoid losing out to US inflation.
Savings is explicitly idle money. Illiquid holdings are very different from cash that can deployed immediately. You certainly don’t hold 100% property and by definition that unspent money is savings.
Savings can certainly be used to purchase securities, commodities, property, but then it’s no longer savings and is an investment.
Savings is not idle money. Savings is stored value. Currency is an intentionally lossy short-term store of value designed to incentivize allocation of capital into long-term savings vehicles like stocks, bonds and real estate that are productive and help the economy.
Idle cash hurts the economy. That's why even in a savings account, idle cash isn't idle, it's collateralizing loans. A savings account is more of a bond than it is currency. As such, in your model, money in a savings account is an investment - not savings. In your model the only thing that would qualify as savings would be literal dollar bills stuffed under your mattress.
Liquidity is a different axis.
And as for myself, I hold more than 100% of my net worth in assets, the cash in my bank account is borrowed against my asset portfolio.
This is also an extremely common position for anyone with a mortgage to be in.
I agree that fiat is intentionally lossy. I also have no problem with the idea of my idle money being, in fact, borrowed out at no risk to myself (and at recent interest rates there wouldn’t be much difference between sticking it my cushions except for the insurance provided by holding in a bank). From the saver’s perspective, it’s idle.
If you are holding more than 100% of your total net worth in assets, the cash in your bank account isn’t yours, nor is anything else above that 100%. As a borrower inflation is a great way to take advantage of that position. I have mortgage debt for exactly the same reason. Mortgage debt, however, is typically net worth positive (except for 2008-2014), so I doubt most people with mortgages are leveraged higher than their net worth. In most cases market value of a house is greater than mortgage debt a few years after the loan is made.
Again, using your definition, savings must be limited to cash, physical cash, in a mattress. It cannot be even in a checking or a savings account as those are technically variable-coupon perpetual bonds. [1] CDs are bonds too. The only reason they're not listed as bonds is there is a carve-out in securities law that if they're issued by banks, they're exempt from registration. They're not really zero risk, because in theory, the FDIC could go under. They won't but for the purposes of our discussion, a bond or bond fund in a brokerage account is the same as a savings or checking account. So then why is one "savings" and one "investment?"
> From the saver’s perspective, it’s idle.
That's just a fun illusion, not a useful or meaningful distinction.
> If you are holding more than 100% of your total net worth in assets, the cash in your bank account isn’t yours, nor is anything else above that 100%.
Nope, it's mine - because the margin loan is collateralized by the contents of my portfolio. The cash that comes out is separate. Nobody has a claim on my cash but me - if there's a 90% drawdown across all markets my portfolio will be liquidated to cover, but the cash will remain mine.
According to investopedia the only real difference between savings and investments - as they view them - is liquidity, risk profile and time horizon. All of which you can achieve in a brokerage account by constructing your portfolio to meet your goals.
The thing is, saved currency will go down in value unless deployed because the point is to save your value. You can save your value in all sorts of ways, but currency ain't it. One keeps a small cash cushion in the event of emergencies, but you're paying a premium for that liquidity (inflation - interest).
From your link: “income that is not spent on current consumption.”
Income is not limited to money, you can do something and be paid in physical goods. Either indirectly by being paid in them or directly by at making them ex: canning tomatoes you grew.
I agree with that. In that case savings would be the goods that remain unused or at least left in a condition that did not put their value at risk (e.g. eating the tomatoes). A properly canned food can be a great store of value for a decade or longer and is a hedge against inflation, however are suboptimal after a point due to their volume and mass. An entire pantry may be the equivalent value of one oz of gold, for example, though with more immediate utility.
You think in terms of money because that’s what your paid in, but for subsistence farmers who never deal in money it was the excess physical harvest etc.
Where investments differ is the possibility of returns above what was saved. A pound of gold is still going to be a pound of gold in 1,000 years, but land can provide rental income so you still have land but now you also have money or what or whatever.
What muddled the water is people used to have savings accounts that provided interest above inflation.
Let's assume 50% of the population is retired and has saved money. The other 50% is working full time. A deadly virus wiped out 50% of the working population. All products are now twice as expensive.
>. At least in the US inflation is the result of decoupling dollars from gold and the direct theft of gold and silver from the citizens by the government.
No, it is caused by ignoring the fact that labor cannot be stored. Gold is just a token, it is like an entry in a balance sheet but harder to forge. It doesn't actually store anything other than itself. You can't store labor by turning it into gold. Gold was already in the ground and was dug out by labor. There is no way to get that labor back. People age. They can't be stored like gold. The inherent mismatch between gold and people is what causes inflation. The only difference is that due to its limited supply gold then swings back to deflation and then inflation again but simply introducing a gold standard doesn't solve the inflation problem, it is the origin of the inflation problem. Fiat currency is just a stretched gold standard. They are still tokens, they are easier to forge and more importantly fiat money doesn't age either. So inflation must still happen as a consequence.
> It is, however, an obscured tax on savers, a transfer of wealth from borrowers to debtors.
By this logic aging is a tax on savers. Defaulting on debt is also a tax on savers. Savers deceiving themselves is a tax on savers.
Sure, gold can be used as a token to represent work, but it has utility beyond just that. The only way to inflate gold is by actual labor. Fiat is inflated by whim and has no value except as a store of work/time. Any hyper-inflationary story from the last 100 years makes it reasonably obvious how fiat can go to zero value while gold held from the same period has approximately the same value in trade (100oz of gold could buy you a car in 1950; 25oz of gold could do the same today, 400oz for a house vs 200 today, etc.).
The US literally stole gold from the population in 1933. A $20 bill was literally a certificate for an ounce of gold.
I’m not advocating a gold standard or any other monetary peg, just saying that removing a peg and moving to fiat is never in the benefit of those holding the fiat and always in the benefit of those printing.
I’m not sure I follow the last sentence. Inflation requires time, so sure, aging and holding fiat results in lost value. Borrowers are on the positive side of inflation, so except for the literal tax that may be incurred by debt forgiveness the repossession of property by the lender is approximately neutral. That’s really the point of fiat currency, the printer is the borrower of real property and the note is a promise of repayment, ultimately in real property, securities, or labor.
I think they meant that "a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services." is theft.
A ton of the discussion of inflation ties it in a 1:1 way to money printing. Like the government says "I'd like some more money please", prints money, and this evenly inflates the price of every good and "steals" from people's bank accounts. While this can be a component of inflation, the truth is much more complex.
Looking at the published CPI numbers it becomes extremely clear that inflation is extremely varied. Natural gas way way up. Medical commodities up only a small amount. Prices can rise for an absolutely enormous number of different reasons and the price of a good going up obviously cannot be considered "theft" in the abstract. The people who insist that governments are unjust if they allow any inflation above 0% are being unreasonable, in my opinion.
That said, it is also the case that public policy, especially public policy in authoritarian or failed states, can cause a currency to collapse and wipe out any wealth their citizens hold in that currency. But I'm not even sure I'd call this "theft". It is a different sort of abuse entirely and it comes in many more forms than just devalued currency.
Money is a claim on people's time and we haven't invented cryogenic chambers and demanded that the unemployed enter those cryogenic chambers during their time of unemployment to prevent them from aging, ahem, I mean stealing the value of your money.
As it stands right now, labor cannot be stored. Your money must age at the rate people age if nobody is hiring the unemployed for investments. What I personally find particularly amusing is that there are so many branches of economics (I could Marxism as one) that postulate that money is just a medium of exchange and thus can't be harmful.
Yet internet forums are filled with angry savers that want to use their money for anything other than a medium of exchange.
> Right now I'm looking at Turkey - I honestly can't tell whether Erdoğan is just a trickster, or actually fucking retarded. Likely both.
If he introduces a debt brake then lowering interest rate for government bonds is the right strategy. The interest that you don't have to pay can be used to pay down the principal and reduce debt faster than paying interest could ever achieve. The problem is that he isn't doing a debt brake at all.
There are two ways of looking at money. In the case of physical tokens you have just as many before and after inflation so that’s not theft.
The other way is to consider it as an abstraction of value independent of these tokens. But who then pays to maintain the system, prevent counterfeits, and issue replacements for used tokens etc? It’s the government that issues these tokens and as such the loss of value over time is simply a payment for use of the system. You might disagree with how large the fee is, but it’s a medium of exchange so you can trade your tokens for something else.
>The other way is to consider it as an abstraction of value independent of these tokens.
What I honestly can't comprehend is that people somehow want this but then they twist their brain somehow into wanting something even more contradictory. Humans are loss averse, so the first thing they do when they hear of a loss is to shoot the messenger. In economics that messenger is the interest rate. The price signal known as the interest rate isn't allowed to fall into negative territory. The price signal that tells everyone in the economy that there is too much financial capital is now gone. People will now accumulate financial capital i.e. money and money like assets (bonds) above and beyond what debtors actually want because the debtors have been silenced. Their opinion doesn't matter. Only the opinion of the saver who wants to shove the losses and risks onto someone else is being listened to.
At the end, people are surprised to hear that they have accumulated way too much financial capital than the economy can handle and that their financial capital is actually worth much less than they thought.
Why didn't anyone warn them that this is occurring? Oh right, they shot the messenger. An interest rate below zero means that there is too much financial capital, nobody wants your bloody money rich guy, and that the biggest savers should reduce the amount they are saving, yes, that means the rich must spend off a greater portion of their savings than the poor which decentralizes money into the hands of those who need it the most.
I am honestly tired of this. Conservatives and hardcore capitalists shout "central planning!?!" or "price controls!?!" at everything but the moment you point out that a 0% interest rate is an artificial price control they will fall silent or think they are genuinely owed the enslavement of the young.
It hurts people disproportionately who have more of it, so it's progressive if anything. But not in practice because right people save assets not money, and poor people are usually in debt. Debtors benefit from inflation because it reduces the real cost of their debt.
MMT-caused inflation just an effect of an alternative to taxation and is an effective means to keep spending moving. Like any other outcome of monetary policy it has winners and losers
We're seeing more and more economic focused posts making it to the front page lately. We're all thinking about it due to high inflation and few options to protect our cash savings. That said, the quality of HN comments regarding economics tend to be, in my experience, quite low. I'd suggest anyone interested go seek out more qualified analysis beyond a weekend HN thread full of people like me regurgitating half understood economics theories we've absorbed over the last two years.
Inflation topics can be particularly misleading to new investors who haven’t yet realized that nobody actually “invests” in cash across decades like this example. At least not if they have basic financial education.
It can also confuse new investors who might not realize that USD-denominated assets don’t lose value like USD itself. This may seem obvious to anyone who has studied Econ or investing, but it’s actually a very common misunderstanding among people who are new to the concept of inflation. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding is often misused to scare people into thinking their only options for avoiding inflation are gold or cryptocurrency, which isn’t true at all.
For 99% of us working our comfortable tech jobs in stable countries, it’s more enlightening to consider how the author would have done with S&P 500 or gold (hint: Gold loses by a lot).
To clarify - this isn't to say that non USD denominated assets don't lose value if compared to the currency its denominated right?
That is, I could replace 'USD' with any other currency in both occurrences in the phrase: `USD-denominated assets don’t lose value like USD itself.` and it would still be true, right?
I recently purchased a subscription to The Economist and have been listening to the top stories on a daily basis. That said, it seems to be more politics than economics.
That paper's misnomer aside, you probably don't want to listen to economists to learn how economies work. The soft sciences tend to get a bad rep but economists tend to be the ones most resembling ideological fan fiction.
This is playing out currently, quite openly, as the FTC investigates whether companies have raised prices more than costs have risen from inflation. It's becoming increasingly clear that the academic economic consensus is, simply, disconnected from how markets actually operate. For instance, while each day has brought a new study of consolidated companies engaging in pandemic price gouging, academic establishment luminaries like Larry Summers continue to argue that antitrust is unrelated to inflation.
Larry Summers was 100% right about impending inflation. He’s been totally vindicated. I’m suspicious of where you are getting your information and suspect it’s politically motivated.
Larry Summers has been wrong numerous other times and this is pure confirmation by settling on one where he hasn't been. Broadly this is the basis for macroeconomics jumping from one "analyst" to another with the benefit of hindsight. Just look at how many diff predictors for recessions there are - the yield curve was supposed to be the best one. When a recession does occur, economists will prove to the one that was correlated to predict the next one.
It’s quite the opposite. Economics is generally the most rigorous of the social sciences.
Even the “worst” discipline, macroeconomics, tends to yield high quality predictions. Larry Summers was screaming from the rooftop about how the Covid stimulus would result in inflation
Microeconomics maybe. Macro is highly speculative since there is borderline no basis for experimentation and inference, and every incidence has no precedence. This is very broadly understood and accepted by economists themselves
Where would I suggest for you to get a real education in economics or where would I suggest you go to become another armchair economist like me? :)
Personally I'd stick with Boglehead type advice and focus on your career(assuming you're in tech). My day job is the only thing that's ever consistently generated wealth for me.
I am in a special situation having to make up for lost time being out of the market and being divorced, so I am trying riskier things that I really wouldn't recommend for anyone else.
Once you go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand macroeconomic trends and betting accordingly, well, it becomes rather distracting. I can't recommend it.
If you really want to 'go there' well... I don't know. I follow a random collection of FinTwit folks. Lately I like Doomberg and "The Maverick of Wall Street". I also follow folks like Mohamed El-Erian, Buffett/Munger and Jeremy Grantham
Haha, well, my undergrad was actually Economics and I assure you I am still an armchair economist!
Reading the annual notes / investment updates by certain more prolific managers can be useful, but they all have their own bias and honestly its not particularly insightful from an economics perspectives. (More finance than economics)
1228 pesos in 1976 was worth about $4.50 in 1976 USD [1].
... and if he'd bought into the S&P 500 (Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 [2]), it would be worth about about $190 in today's USD. Which you could sell to buy about 2.99g of gold today (3 trillion times as much as reported).
While obvious you'd have to be extremely prescient to put your money in a completely different type of fund that had launched only just that year and at the time they would not have touched such small dollar investments.
... but today we now know that Bogle's idea was actually pretty good and you really can make such small dollar investments (eg. Fidelity's no-fee, large cap fund has no minimum to invest (FNILX), or you could buy a fractional share of a variety of large cap ETFs: SPY (SPDR), IVV (iShares), or VOO (Vanguard) from a variety of brokerages). Of course, a minor wouldn't be able to own shared directly... so, get your kids a UTMA account [4].
And how could he have done it, being in Argentina in 1976? Not even asking about Vanguard. Just accessing s&p500 or NASDAQ is not easy even today, don't think it was much easier then.
If the thesis of the thread was "Gee, it sure sucked to grow up in Argentina in the 70s with no access to high-quality financial products." that would be extremely relevant... but the thesis is much more expansive than that ("Prepare for a fantastic lesson about the power of inflation." / "Takeaway: may the sign of the exponential be ever in your favor. Positive, you own the world. Negative, you get diluted into nanoparticles.").
The folks getting spooked about inflation right now and reading this thread (it is written in English after all), almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products. There's no need to get fatalistic about saving ("you get diluted into nanoparticles."), it has never been easier for normal people to put their money to work productively.
> The folks [...] reading this thread almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products.
...and then the stock market gets stopped for a couple of weeks and exchange rate of international currencies becomes practically state-controlled.
> There's no need to get fatalistic about saving
There absolutely is a need, when the life just doesn't work like people here are pretending it does.
It's all just an extremely US-centric view, people there are just lucky to live in a fantastically economically stable environment, but this leads to them being unprepared to potential economic shocks, including not enough support for the discussions of ways to evade the consequences for regular citizens.
Argentina has experienced multiple rounds of hyperinflation due to failed monetary policy. Saying this story is a "lesson about the power of inflation" is like saying "the sun is hot". Yes, it certainly is, but it is so far beyond normal definitions of "hot" that people will have a hard time understanding it. This is more a story about the failures of Argentina's governments over the last 50 years than a story about inflation.
In 2011, while still at my first job, I spent a few days touring in Buenos Aires. At the time, 1 Brazilian Real was worth 2 Argentine Pesos. It was enough to feel like a rich there.
About ten years later, 1 Brazilian Real is now worth more than 24 Argentine Pesos. Of course, during the same period, Brazil had some crisis too. So, it is much harder for me today to save enough to spend a few days in Buenos Aires. Sad.
A lot of countries have experienced serious inflation at one point or usually multiple points in history - all countries that are not young (>300 years). It is not perfectly reasonable to expect that yours will not experience it during your lifetime, particularly if you're young. Volatility has this nasty property that it's only bounded from below, but not from above.
It's one thing to say that every country experiences inflation a few times in history, which might or might not be the case, depending on your definition of high inflation.
Argentina's Consumer Price index rose 6.7% during March. No, not YoY, but MoM. And if you look at history, it's not even a particularly high number. So I'd say that by the definition of most people, the country has a very big, long lasting and structural problem with inflation.
I made that comment because I know people are going to use the linked example of what happened in Argentina as the predicted fate of what will happen in the US. That seems to be what you are implying here by drawing parallels between the two. But I simply want to make it clear that the US is at 8% inflation for the last year while Argentina spent decades with the average annual inflation rate measured in the hundreds. The two aren't close to the same.
> But I simply want to make it clear that the US is at 8% inflation for the last year while Argentina spent decades with the average annual inflation rate measured in the hundreds. The two aren't close to the same.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
With all due respect, I feel the quote is a bit pithy here. Not all things which are gradual become sudden, and the quote doesn’t give any proof that this is one of those things.
Yes. AFAIK inflation in Argentina is a chicken and egg problem.
The government prints money, not to have more, but to force economic movement from below. More money handed through social welfare means more money in lower classes hands, and that means more people buying new things and local market activity.
The government does that because most companies with the financial power to invest are be very reluctant to invest in a such unstable economy. Also, most individuals with more money will quickly move the cash somewhere abroad.
So, companies don't invest and richer people are quick ot move their money elsewhere. If the government doesn't act, the economy stalls. But now because the government printed more money, the peso is now less valuable and the economy is now more unstable, feeding this feedback loop.
> There are a lot of people that think we can print spend endless amounts of money without consequences.
I’ve seen this said more than I’ve seen people who actually think that. Most people have heard horror stories of hyperinflation and, if anything, are overly weary of inflation than not.
The comment above makes a good point. These types of hyperinflation situations are the result of serious mismanagement and deeper issues. When considering inflation, it’s important to study real resource constraints and any debts that need to be paid back in foreign currencies. All the famous examples of hyperinflation involve issues with these factors.
Brazil had its own share of problems with hyperinflation during the 80's and early 90's. I remember the behavior it conditioned people.
Once people got their paychecks, they would rush to the supermarket to buy as much as they could, by the end of the month they wouldn't be able to buy that much with the same amount of money.
People ran ahead supermarket staff which updated prices so they could buy the same product at a previous price.
Gas stations had long queues during the night when there were news about about gas prices rising.
My father developed and interesting habit: whatever he bought, he would write in the box how much it cost in gasoline liters. That way we could have a good idea of how much each thing really cost. It was somewhat funny many years later finding old boxes written "Custou dez litros de gasolina".
I'm from the US but I lived in Argentina for about 5 years (2013-2018). It was a great lesson, and I'm seeing things in the US now that I used to see in Argentina. At the bank recently, they had a sign about the national shortage of coins. That was common in Argentina. Sizes of products getting smaller in order to keep the price the same - "inflacion escondido" (hidden inflation).
The ostensible reason for the coin shortage was COVID-related supply chains. Stores were also trying to minimize handling of cash especially early-on in the pandemic.
This is overlaid with the fact that, in the US:
1. A lot of people (though certainly not everyone) don't use a lot of cash these days
2. Coin denominations have basically been unchanged since I was born--which was... not recently. So you have lower denomination coins that cost more to make than they're worth.
In some cases, that may be technically true but I suspect that the costs of turning bags of pennies into cash that is > than the face value of the pennies is iffy at best.
The single greatest difference between the United States and Argentina is the world's debts, as tracked by the IMF, aren't denominated in any of the pesos or peso variants Argentina has used over the past several decades.
Were the us to try and trade out dollars for NuDollars, they would find the dollar won't go away because the world will still be using it to trade and pay down its debts.
The dollar being the world's international trade currency has a significant anchoring effect that makes it extremely difficult to extrapolate from lessons learned in other countries to the United States.
If the US decides to replace 10 Dollars with 1 NuDollars, then the IMF and everyone else will just search and replace and fix all the paperwork. It's not hard at all.
The problem may be if there is for many years a high unpredictable inflation that is higher than most developed countries. In that case other countries may decide to use Euros, Swiss Franc, Yuanes, Yens or whatever has a more stable value.
There's nothing in international law that makes that automatic.
It would create an interesting open question how the IMF would respond. In practice, it won't happen because raising the question would (as you noted) bea colossally stupid move for the US for global influence reasons. They have a lot of leverage from being the printer of the world's currency-of-record.
The point missed in most save/invest vs. spend arguments is this:
If you've been raised to be a saver, you are well trained at living cheaper/less frivolously. Note that this presupposes that you make enough money to live reasonably and save; I'm not talking about the extreme poverty cases where immediately spending the rare windfall actually makes sense.
By cheaper, I mean one car instead of two, simpler vacations, less eating out, less fancy house, "using up" quality consumer goods instead of constantly replacing them with the latest fashionable stuff (e.g. second complete kitchen makeover in 15 years).
Suppose person A makes X and spends X and saves nothing. Person B makes the same, but spends 0.5X and saves 0.5X. Now suppose an economic disaster where all those savings are wiped out and A and B additionally end up taking a 50% pay cut. Who will continue to live in comfort, albeit with misgivings about not being able to save up again?
It's protective against downside, but can constrain your upside. I was raised a saver, and it's been very hard to hire out simple tasks & let go of trifles, which in turn constrains how much time & energy you have to focus on increasing your earnings. As a low earner, it's better to focus on efficiency & DIY, but as a high earner it's irrational to spend an hour getting bent out of shape over a few dollars.
Absolutely agree, which is why, for example, I don't do my own car repairs any more. But you can still have a less fancy car and keep it longer. And I don't want to focus on increasing my earnings. I'd much rather be fixing something around the house.
The problem with car and house repairs is that even if you have money to pay for it, managing them still takes tremendous amount of time. In fact so, that for trivial repairs it's easier to order supplies and tools and do them myself. So one way or another car and house consume time.
Next level is to hire people to manage it for you, but this is completely different level of income.
Thinking about money and its hypothetical worth in X years is a waste of mind resources, at least for me. Instead, I'm going to just save 20-25% and spend the rest on being happy. If things go south, so what? I've got an expiry date and one day these things won't be a problem.
That's a pretty decent savings rate. When you say save, though, do you mean putting it in the bank or a diversified portfolio of factor tilted global index funds?
Zeihan in tears. I really enjoy his description of geopolitics, but the man definitely overestimates Argentina repeatedly for no bloody reason.
When I was a child, I saved a little of my allowance to start with, but then rapidly realized that every year I was blowing away (in earnings) my savings from the previous year. Soon my porn and bootleg music high-school business was beating all the savings of the previous year. Then my ad fraud "business" plus my fake reviews "business" was beating that.
I dropped all of that stuff, went to uni for other things and then eventually started engineering later in life than most people and the pattern repeated in earnings. Through sheer luck I happened to make choices that aimed at growth rather than savings.
Pure savings are over-rated. You should hold nearly everything in inflation-protected assets. And loads of these are crazy liquid. Plus, I have friends with whom I have a de-facto liquidity pool. It's sort of a liquidity insurance mechanism: we'll just help each other over temporary liquidity humps.
One of my friends had to leave the US temporarily because of a green card processing delay due to COVID and he knew that I'd cover his mortgage if he needed me to. Helps you sail closer to the wind knowing that only broad-based economic failure can hurt.
What are some examples of these crazy liquid assets?
In the past I've spent extra money on tools, a house and some gold and silver (as I have a goldsmithing hobby). The house is difficult to unload, at least mentally, pretty good market. The tools have kept their value, but finding a buyer is difficult. The gold and silver are a similar story, but tend to fluctuate in value rapidly.
Global stock and precious metals ETF's are inflation-resistant and quite liquid. You'll pay only 0.02% spread to liquidate them and have the cash in your bank account within a few days. As opposed to a house which is generally 6% spreads and a couple months to liquidate. Only in exceptional liquidity crises (August 2008 - March 2009, and March 2020) are you at risk of cashing out for 30-50% losses. 80% of the time it's at value or higher. So you just need a small percentage of assets that are deflation-resistant (cash & bonds) for the small periods of time deflation happens, to pay your expenses.
As a grateful person with sufficient income, we are contributing IRS gift limit of 15-16k per parent to kids account. Eventually when the time is right we will get her practice investing also with the hope that she will see how much her account has grown by the virtue of compounding. Before then we are planning to get her do chores for neighbors and learn to earn money and get her save.
Cash should be seen as medium of exchange rather than store of value. If you saved for a bike, the bike was probably worth much more to you than a picogram of gold. Even if you ended up forgetting about your penny jar and finding it in the attic as an adult, the act of saving itself gave your valuable lessons about planning and delayed gratification.
On the other hand, if you made even a conservative investment like a thin silver chain or a popular book with author autograph, I bet you will get more than your money's worth for that today. If you bought a share of Apple stock - woah, but I guess we couldn't have all known back then.
As adults, yeah we should know better than to keep our wealth essentially in the pockets of politicians. Invest in something that will be useful to your or someone else even many years later, or profit-generating businesses. But there is nothing wrong with children play-learning a simplified version of life rather than immediately having to know the difference between mutual funds and ETFs.
Are there any kids book that explain these money concepts to elementary school kids? I feel one the big failings of the school system is that these are not taught early on and instead a lot of time is spent teaching things that kids will never use in their lives.
A book I read well over 30 years ago, and is still apparently updated today, is "The Kids' Money Book" by Neale S. Godfrey, which you can certainly find secondhand for cheap. There are updated versions authored by Jamie Kyle McGillian, and so long as they are in the original vein they are probably excellent.
However it's not something I would throw at a 6-year old. A sharp 8-year old should be able to grok all of it though.
Reminds me of this excellent video https://youtu.be/HLIJkmy3vy8
it's in Spanish, he tells the story of explaining a financial system crash to his daughter. Probably has subtitles in English, I recommend it
You need to understand exponentials to really get it. Where I live, they only teach it in advanced math classes in 11th grade, so elementary school seems ambitious.
OP describes investment strategy that is destined to fail (i.e. keep money in savings account). This is in fact great way to teach the children by inducing failure so they understand why they need to learn investing instead of saving. My mom always converted cash to gold instinctively because she did not trust government printed paper. In US, people tend to keep money in S&P 500 with rather poor return but still well protected against inflation. The problem is still that money earned over time increases at least linearly for most people. This means that whatever amount you saved up as kid isn’t going to amount much even if it was inflation protected. For instance, all the money I saved up as kid for 10 years and put in S&P 500 for inflation protection will still come bit short to match my one month income.
When Ceausescu's regime fell in late 1989 a piece of bread was costing 3.75 lei. About 10 years later, late '90s-early 2000s, a piece of bread was costing 3,000 lei. Hight inflation is a bitch.
Why exactly do we want to reward already rich people at the expense of poorer people? Somehow, people convinced themselves that giving money to those who don't need it is efficient.
It’s not that we want to. Its not our choice. It’s decided by the people, or the foreign countries, that have the money to lend. It’s the rate they are willing to lend at. Most don’t lend it for free.
It's a lot easier for the rich to "just not borrow" that it is for the poor. Capitalism was designed so people HAVE to borrow money to do things, so saying that you can just avoid things by not borrowing is elitist at best.
University, Medical Bills, Housing - all are things that many people (in NA at least) need to borrow money for. Borrowing money is an integral part to move up the social and economic ladder for most people alive today.
If everyone puts their money in the bank and gets 5% (say), then the proportion of wealth will remain unchanged. (FWIW, a similar argument against Proof of Stake (that it will inevitably lead to greater and greater inequality) is similarly flawed. (This doesn't mean that PoS is a good idea.))
I assure you that the bank is making good money out of using that capital. Are you suggesting that it’s better that the bank keep all the profits rather than some of it going to the person lending the bank that money?
Same happened with my savings as a child in Bulgaria - my grandparents were putting into that savings account significant amount of money evety month, and when I tried to withdraw them later, all that savings were worth nothing! This should be a lesson to all of us - at least it was for me!
Fun fact: You will likely lose more money in divorce (about 50% probability in Western world) than all the money you had saved throughout all of the married combined by choosing cheaper vacations, forgoing hobbies, finding discounts, buying inexpensive cloths and cars.
So there is something to be said for keeping your savings in a stable currency or asset but that doesn't necessary protect you from negative government action. Some examples:
1. Many Russians held funds in currencies other than rubles. Faced with sanctions, Putin instituted forced conversion to rubles. So far the ruble hasn't been decimated but this could still go south;
2. Venezuela essentially prevents conversion of currencies. I mean it's complicated. There's a government rate and a black market rate and the country is under completely unjustifiable sanctions; and
3. Argentina is also currently restricting access to foreign currencies;
4. Years ago, Argentinians held funds in foreign currencies. Local banks held foreign currencies against those deposits. When things went south the banks basically packed up all their money, put it on a plane, flew it out and then declared bankruptcy or just threw up their hands; and
5. Some will even point to FDR's sovereign devaluation of the US dollar as another bad example. In the 1930s, the government forced purchase gold for $20/oz (the peg at the time) and then revalued the US dollar at $35/oz.
This last one is a constant point of consternation for gold bugs turned Crypto Andys.
And no crypto isn't the answer here.
My point here is that you cannot overstate the importance of multigenerational wealth creation in the developed world. The dark truth here is that the US has often had a hand in the above events that have essentiaally stolen accumulated wealth from ordinary citizens.
> So far the ruble hasn't been decimated but this could still go south
The ruble was worth 0.14 dollars before the war and now is worth 0.12, which is just below a 0.014 reduction in its value, so it has quite literally and almost exactly been decimated, as it was done in roman tradition.
This has nothing to do with gold. He is comparing the exchange rate of the Argentine peso and the USD.
That exchange rate is appalling over time because Argentina relies heavily on USD denominated imports and issues debt denominated in USD to obtain them.
Saving and buying collector edition video games might be a good purchase for a kid that might pay off later.
A corvette might be a good investment too, if they stop making gasoline cars in the near future.
A friend of mine lives in Argentina. He pays his living expenses in Bitcoin to other Argentinians. They are very happy to take it, even without legal tender laws because it doesn't rapidly regularly devalue like the Argentinian currency.
That would be true if the only way to create a failed currency was to print it to death. But we've observed cryptocurrencies with mining caps collapse to $0 in the same way as a fiat currency.
That it does, but I understand that Bitcoin's deflationary by default nature has also been criticized.
Bitcoin also adds new failure cases such as irreparably losing money through address typos and lost/failed hard drives, not to mention the numerous & exciting failures in DeFi.
These were Zimbabwe dollars, however, and in the late 1990s it all inflated away to nothing. So much for conscientious saving.