72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes

https://eco3min.fr/en/us-inflation-is-not-linear/

by latentframe • 4 months ago

216 244 4 months ago

eco3min.fr

p1esk• 4 months ago

How about other currencies?

latentframe• 4 months ago

Only USD for now. Would be interesting to compare — especially currencies that went through hyperinflation episodes.

milesskorpen• 4 months ago

1950-1985 and 1985-now are pretty steady. Decreased inflation volatility over time.

I think your chart shows the "that inflation slowly erodes purchasing power over time." That doesn't mean there aren't periods of change - if you study economic history at all you know about the Great Depression and stagflation - but for ~50 years it's been pretty well managed.

anonymous_sorry• 4 months ago

The cumulative duration of these four episodes looks to be about 30 years, so about a quarter of the total time period looked at

Interesting, but not quite as dramatic as I assumed from the title.

mkagenius• 4 months ago

Has to be taken in light of median income too right?

bubbleRefuge• 4 months ago

so long and income exceeds or keeps up with inflation growth, it doesn't matter

6510• 4 months ago

Right, then: 1910 normal salary was 200-400 (say 300), if 97% of value of the dollar was lost in 2026 the normal salary should be 6666 - 13333 (say $10 000)

znnajdla7• 4 months ago

This supports my hunch that the current Iran war creates a lethal trifecta that could potentially cause a dollar collapse. 1. Massive military overspend. 2. Petrodollar squeeze (Strait of Hormuz). 3. Allies pulling out: Europe and the Gulf diversifying both their investments and defense purchases.

#1 creates oversupply of dollars and #2 and #3 lower demand. This study supports the idea that wars can indeed destroy purchasing power.

engineer_222• 4 months ago

It could also be a play to squeeze China or similar nation dependent on middle east oil. USA semicon production not ready, if there were signals that China was ready for a play on Taiwan maybe this is a gambit to buy some time.

znnajdla7• 4 months ago

That would be a double whammy for America then: a devalued dollar and higher oil prices. Both cause inflation.

China doesn’t seem to be squeezed when they seem to have a deal with Iran to buy in yuan.

thisislife22• 4 months ago

Is China really dependent on middle-east oil? I read that they had been diversifying in preparation for an energy resource fight for some time now. For example, they've massively invested in Solar power generation, are building a 300-400 billion dollar gas pipeline from Russia, already buy a lot of oil to from Russia, and also purchased from Venezuela (though how that's going now is anybody's guess). They also have a good relationship with most of the players in the middle-east and helped repair ties between the Saudis and the Iranians.

unstatusthequo• 4 months ago

I think the idea is crash the stock market to force interest rate drop to refinance the massive debt.

senderista• 4 months ago

Huh? Wouldn't bond yields go up if stocks went down?

bloppe2• 4 months ago

That's not how bonds work

thisislife22• 4 months ago

Iran is also playing its own Uno card here by saying that it would consider allowing some oil and gas shipments through the Strait if they have been bought with Chinese Yuan, than the US dollar. ( The Islamic Republic may grant safe passage to oil tankers if the cargo is traded in Chinese yuan - https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/iran-allow-chinese-ships-hormu... ).

d3ckard4• 4 months ago

This is particularly funny if you consider petrodollar to be a bad deal for US, not a good one. Ironically, if yuan becomes new petroleum currency, it might hurt Chinese long term.

radlad• 4 months ago

I've never heard the expression "to play one's Uno card." Is this a play on "to play one's Trump card"? I can understand why this phrasing could cause confusion, but want to make sure I'm not missing something.

leche2• 4 months ago

One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way. I don't think they're right. I do think they will continue weakening the dollar.

skywhopper2• 4 months ago

The bigger question is, why is that even the primary goal?

marcosdumay4• 4 months ago

They are right on that. What they are wrong is when they decided that is a good thing.

Not every kind of "bringing manufacturing back" brings the same kind of wealth and quality of life.

cheema33• 4 months ago

One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way.

Only cheap labor can bring manufacturing back to the US. Are Americans willing to work in factories for the same wages as the Chinese and Indians? I don't see it happening.

dathinab• 4 months ago

I don't think they're right.

it's worse then them not being right

the only way a weak dollar would majorly matter for bringing back production is iff production is cheap

so a 20% weaker dollar must not come with 20% higher "dollar" prices (living cost, salary). You need to decrees living cost and dollar value in lock step (i.e. weaker dollar without inflation!). But this seem impossible IMHO. And if we look at what happened, if anything, it went the other way.

And if you try to force it anyway you are basically saying "we effectively disown most money of most US citizens" and use that to try to attack manufacturing, while likely not relevantly affecting the wealthiest.

That is just plain evil.

And not very surprising if you consider that many "manufacturing countries" have pretty horrifying working conditions often not "that" far apart from slavery.

Worse this likely wouldn't work either, because iff your countries population doesn't have the money to buy stuff anymore, and investments are risky, why would you even bother to produce there? To then export to countries where investments into production lines are more reliable? Like how is that supposed to work?

Naturally things can be different if we only speak about high-tech / high-end manufacturing. But the current steps do not seem promising to archive that either:

1) this kind of manufacturing lines need even higher investments, i.e. act even more allergic wrt. trade instability and uncertainty

2) Trump has brought some high tech manufacturing into the US with a mixture of force and bribes/subsidization. But honestly it looks a lot of it is mostly hollow promises, not making a relevant difference long term.

3) More then one case where companies did agree had a lot of big problems. One of the biggest issue being, that missing in depth know-how requires temp. importing people which can make sure things work while teaching that know how (if you want things to get going fast. If you go slow you can send your people to other countries to learn.). But a destroyed visa system makes this a high risk for anyone coming to the US and did lead to more then one person like that being detained and deported by ICE. The other risk is if this people don't teach enough you become dependent on foreign workers in a strange way for a while.

Either way nothing in the current politics seems to be actually well thought through ways to archive (relevantly) more manufacturing in the US long term. But everything seems to be designed to destroy the wealth of the majority of US citizens.

preommr• 4 months ago

Europe and the Gulf diversifying both their investments and defense purchases.

With what? The euro, yuan? Or weapons from france?

I hate to admit it, but it's much less that the US is great because it's the reserve currency, and much more that the world reserve currency is the dollar because the US is what it is.

Weapons are expensive, and it only makes sense to buy them from a country that specializes in them. And a country that makes weapons at huge scale is likely to be big enough tilt the direction of the country to be all the ugly things the modern US military industrial complex is.

fwipsy2• 4 months ago

I'm having trouble reconciling this comment with reports that US stockpiles are already being depleted by the Iran war. At this point the US weapons production seems relatively specialized and inefficient, not "huge scale." Someone more informed care to weigh in?

znnajdla7• 4 months ago

The US is defaulting on military orders to Europe and Germany just announced a 1 trillion euro rearmament plan. Europe is manufacturing big time. The Gulf states as of yesterday are now buying from Ukraine for fucks sake.

Gud2• 4 months ago

Weapons are only expensive if you want them to be expensive.

Ukraine are butchering Russians for 870 USD per dead soldier.

The USA has the most expensive weapons in the world, the problem is that much of it is obsolete.

Arodex• 4 months ago

The US isn't delivering Patriot missiles to Switzerland. Switzerland froze paiements. The US unilaterally took the money Switzerland escrowed to buy F35s, put them towards paying for Patriot missiles they won't deliver, and asked Switzerland to refill the F35 escrow account. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been siphoned off.

https://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/2026/article/les-usa-detourne...

The US is not a reliable weapon supplier anymore. Contracts don't mean anything anymore.

kingleopold3• 4 months ago

anyone who sees this are early early early, yes it's very likely to happen, probabilistically.

raincole3• 4 months ago

You should check your hunch against the reality, at least periodically. The US dollar has strengthened since the current US-Iran conflict started.

znnajdla7• 4 months ago

I have checked. It’s too early to tell but anyway relative price is not what matters. What matters is purchasing power. EUR purchasing power was better and improving compared to USD. And check out interest rate derivatives — the euro has actually overtaken the dollar as the #1 currency in this massive market.

culi2• 4 months ago

Yes it tends to strengthen during times of conflict as countries buy more dollars in response. That's kinda the whole gimmick with the petrodollar. War is good for the US

But if Iran does successfully force countries to stop using the petrodollar by only allowing countries trading in yuan through the strait, then we could actually see that reverse. IMO destroying the petrodollar is the primary clear "victory" Iran could achieve from this war

dandanua• 4 months ago

It is by design. How else can you make trillionaires?

whynotmaybe• 4 months ago

Zimbabwe did make a 100 trillion note.

roncesvalles12• 4 months ago

#1: US military war spending concerns are largely overblown. It's expending what it already has. The spending is mostly on its own internal industry i.e. the US economy (with due respect to broken window fallacy). It arguably makes it all back from the increase in oil prices.

It's a very different thing to fire a $5m missile that you imported vs one that you made domestically with all-domestic components and labor.

wat100009• 4 months ago

Why is it different? If it’s foreign made then you need to export $5 million of stuff to pay for it, so the economic effect should be similar.

Expending what it already has is true but doesn’t really help. It’s not like we’re going to sit here with a reduced stockpile forever. Those munitions will be replaced. The fact that the spending comes after using them rather than before doesn’t change the equation much.

BadBadJellyBean• 4 months ago

I'd say firing a missile into another country is technically firing finite or hard to acquire resources into another country. All the resources for the new rockets have to be sourced from somewhere and it's not really important where they came from. They are a real cost not some circular funding. It's more or less blowing up big piles of cash that can not easily be replaced.

johnthedebs• 4 months ago

Just noting: it's interesting to see the term "lethal trifecta" used here given the relatively recent coinage relating to LLM security: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

DeathArrow• 4 months ago

Add the fact that some countries are using other currencies to trade oil and goods.

Also, some countries started to use other systems beside SWIFT to transfer money.

elzbardico3• 4 months ago

In my worst cynical days, I think that's exactly the plan.

Erase US government debt via hyper-inflation, and let the people that will still have liquidity buy all remaining assets the middle class will be desperate to sell at pennies on the dollar.

RealityVoid• 4 months ago

This kills the golden goose.

dhosek• 4 months ago

One of the biggest myths that people believe is that war is an economic stimulus. In fact, the US entry into World War II delayed the economic recovery from the Great Depression (and created conditions for a recession after the war). One of the reasons that Republicans were so opposed to entry into the war was because they (correctly) believed that it would delay the US economic recovery. Wars have never been correlated with economic growth.

gwbas1c2• 4 months ago

Instead, $100 in 1914 is worth $3.05 today.

Doesn't that mean $3.05 in 1914 us worth $100 today?

stavros• 4 months ago

Yeah, they must have gotten it the wrong way around.

win311fwg2• 4 months ago

Both are valid, depending on perspective. The joy of English.

kogus• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure you are right. Or to emphasize the devaluation, "$100 today would be worth only $3.05 in 1914."

I think it is astonishing that we accept that in a best case scenario of sustained 2% inflation, we are literally planning for the value of the dollar to be cut in half every 36 years.

empthought2• 4 months ago

Dollars that people hold onto, instead of using to purchase something else of value, are effectively worthless to everyone.

ramesh31• 4 months ago

I think it is astonishing that we accept that in a best case scenario of sustained 2% inflation, we are literally planning for the value of the dollar to be cut in half every 36 years.

Our system is designed to encourage asset ownership, not cash saving. If you stuff it under a mattress for 36 years, yeah you'll get fleeced. But buying assets is the way to keep up; an investment of $100 in the S&P500 in 1990 and never touched would be worth $4,120.93 today.

eykanal• 4 months ago

The purchasing power of $3.05 in 1914 would require $100 in today's time. A bag of "stuff" worth $100 today could have been purchased for $3.05 in 1914.

Technically, it does mean that $3.05 from 1914 is worth $100 today, but that's not a useful way of thinking about this. I.e., if your great-grandfather put $3.05 in an envelope in 1914 and you opened it today, it's still $3.05 worth of money (ignoring wheat pennies being a collectors items and whatnot).

tines• 4 months ago

Why do wars tend to devalue the dollar?

NoraCodes• 4 months ago

The government issues a lot of money to pay for the war but doesn't tend to increase taxes enough to make up for it, so inflation is high.

moralestapia• 4 months ago

(Guess)

A lot of money is printed.

Also, war is not an activity that generates wealth (but to some it does, obviously).

betaby• 4 months ago

Money printing and expensive bonds?

kelseyfrog• 4 months ago

Wars usually involve the destruction of assets. If the same amount of money chases fewer assets, the money has less value.

elictronic• 4 months ago

Weapons cost ALOT and do very little to increase the future economy.

It's the issue Russia is facing right now in Ukraine. Even if Putin wanted to stop, his economy has turned entirely wartime, when it ends the country crashes on itself.

rightbyte• 4 months ago

Crashes? How is that possible. You could take the money spent on bombs and do anything with it including helicopter money or digging holes and it would be better spent.

t-3• 4 months ago

In addition to the already-stated causes of government issuing currency necessary to meet war spending and the fact that war spending produces destruction of economic capability rather than development, wars tend to introduce trade barriers and divert resources away from productive tasks. Whether barriers are legal (tariffs, embargoes), or simply higher premiums due to increased risk, less trade happens, which raises prices (inflation). Economists also really hate number-go-down even when down is good, so policy is oriented towards making sure deflation never gets a chance in the interwar development periods.

kmeisthax• 4 months ago

Only half of the incidents listed were actually full-scale wars (WWI and II). The other two incidents are an oil shock and a pandemic.

The commonality between all four of these incidents is that they correspond to severe supply shocks:

- During WWI and WWII, industrial supply was rerouted by force to the war effort, leaving normal consumer demand unfulfilled.

- During the oil crisis of the 70s, a critical energy input to the American economy massively increased in price due to sanctions placed on America.

- During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant chunk of workers were paid not to work, as a form of deliberate supply destruction to avoid the spread of a novel coronavirus.

In a "normal" economy, supply is flexible enough that you can print money and nobody even notices. The supply curve is smooth and gradual, so prices only rise a little. When supply is constrained, however, prices rise to whatever value is necessary to curtail demand, because they have to. The supply curve is a brick wall.

latenode• 4 months ago

The scary part is not the number. It is that most people living through it barely noticed while it was happening.

jawns• 4 months ago

Another way to frame this is that during inflationary episodes, debt became easier to repay.

My parents bought a house in the 1970s. Because of the inflation that occurred during that time, incomes and expenses rose, yet long-term debt obligations such as fixed mortgages remained unchanged; their mortgage payment was the same in year 30 as in year 1.

I guess another way to say it is that during an inflationary period, the people who HAVE money suffer the loss of its purchasing power. But the people who OWE money benefit from the dollar not being what it used to be.

alright2565• 4 months ago

This article over and over describes inflation as a tax or destruction, without backing those claims up. It would be a much stronger article if it focused on the main point rather than having it interspersed with the author's personal opinion of changes in the denominator of a fraction.

uticus• 4 months ago

This article over and over describes inflation as a tax or destruction, without backing those claims up...

C'mon. Whether you agree or not, any time spent in the field will expose you to this philosophy. If you disagree, ignore. There's no need to go through implicit ideas.

logicchains• 4 months ago

This article over and over describes inflation as a tax or destruction, without backing those claims up

Inflation due to money supply increase being like a tax is a fundamental economic result that doesn't need to be rehashed. If you were to counterfeit a trillion dollars and spend it, what happens? You get more things, reducing the remaining supply of things, and everyone else has the same amount of money but chasing a smaller amount of things, so their purchasing power per dollar goes down. It acts as a wealth transfer from other currency holders to yourself. The same applies if the government creates money, but in that case it's called a tax because wealth transfer to the government is termed taxation.

probablypower• 4 months ago

This study doesn't correct for baseline exponential decay due to inflation, to better highlight the meaningful variations. By comparing based on 1914 dollars it also causes old variations to be relatively more extreme and newer inflationary events to look less extreme. You must compare apples to apples.

Finally the events are quite cherry-picked. It is a conclusion looking for a result, when the statistical reason for choosing those 4 events simply isn't evident when you look at the data itself. There is no mathematical rule you could apply to your dataset that would distinctly highlight those 4 periods.

abetusk• 4 months ago

I think this graph shows the "apples to apples" comparison:

https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1800?amount=1

Doing a spot check, this means $1 in in 1913 is equivalent to roughly $32.83 today.

twoodfin2• 4 months ago

That’s ~3.17% compounded annually.

Modest, stable inflation is good. It encourages investment & discourages deferring consumption for indirect monetary reasons.

“Stable” is the hard part.

vessenes3• 4 months ago

Yes, a log chart would be better. That said, apples cannot be compared in this case; probably very few of us would choose to go back to 1914. A Tesla model Y would cost $1,680 in 1901 dollars, but would have been worth millions of those same 1901 dollars. Or nothing, depending on how much charging tech you could fit in the frunk. Many quality of life items are not covered by PPP (or money supply or other measures) adjustments.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 months ago

Why would anyone pay millions of dollars - that would be the equivalent to a billionaire's entire fortune - for a Tesla Model Y in 1901?

You'd have nowhere to charge it. Electricity would be more expensive than gas even if you did.

You'd benefit almost nothing from the technology. There's no internet. Not much of it would work. And it wouldn't really help move you forward technologically, as it's just too advanced.

elzbardico3• 4 months ago

Exactly, it doesn't matter to me how much COVID contributed to the erosion of 1901 100 Dollars.

simplyluke2• 4 months ago

It (presumably) does matter to you how much COVID policy contributed to houses doubling in cost, though.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

You're basically critiquing a chart showing how purchasing power is decayed due to inflation because it isn't adjusted for "baseline" inflation. That doesn't make sense.

And yes, earlier variations are more impactful because compounding.

I will say that a better representation would be a logarithm of the inverse. The problem with doing it this way is that later changes look very small. $1.00 to $.99 is the same y-axis delta as $0.05 to $0.04 but the latter is very different.

rayiner• 4 months ago

Also we’re looking at periods that involve dramatically different monetary policy (gold standard before WWII, Bretton Woods from 1944-1976, then the current regime).

simplyluke2• 4 months ago

One could argue that the defining aspect of each of those shifts in monetary policy has been to devalue the dollar further. I have a relatively basic understanding of economics though, and do understand the arguments that even if that's the outcome it's not an inherently bad one as an american, though a notable effect appears to have been massively widening inequality.

cperciva• 4 months ago

Note that most of this period falls before the modern inflation target was established in 1995. In the past 30 years we've had 75% accumulated annual inflation (aka prices have increased be a factor of exp(0.75) = 2.1) of which 16% (aka 21% of the total) took place during an inflation excursion (which lasted 2.5 years aka 8% of the total time period).

If anything the data points at "inflation targeting works and is producing slow and steady inflation" rather than "inflation comes in concentrated bursts".

raincole3• 4 months ago

The devaluation also mostly happened during the periods that everyone calls good old times now.

trgn• 4 months ago

there was wage growth

marcosdumay4• 4 months ago

Hum... I don't think people refer to the world wars as good times.

Out of them, there's one single interval that most people that talk about it refer as "the end of the good times" (but yeah, I've seen people refer as good times too) and the COVID pandemic.

joelwilliamson• 4 months ago

Who calls WWI, stagflation or Covid good old times? Only the post-WWII boom was really a good time.

cyanydeez• 4 months ago

I believe the broader reason for an inflation target is to increase the value of "doing something" as opposed to "doing nothing" with money. Of course, like most policies, this acts on people with way too much of it and skews the perception of control and locus of control to those entities with too much.

siruwastaken• 4 months ago

Not to reply against you, just to add clarification. This is the reason why a slightly positive inflation rate is normally targeted. Theoretically, it would be entirely possible to target 0% inflation, but then you are so close to possible deflation, that most people would simply save up money instead of buying things from the economy.

PowerElectronix• 4 months ago

That's a bit of falacy. If inflation target were 0%, people would still have an oportunity cost of doing nothing compared to deposits, bonds and other "zero risk" investments. You just stop punishing people that has their wealth in form of cash savings.

2% is an arbitrary number that just looks good and seems to work. The issue is that that target is very much not set into stone, as central banks often disregard or take too long to take action when inflation shoots up. And never, ever do they try to compensate afterwards with a lower target for a time.

You can have a government spend way beyond its income making inflation spike, eroding their own debt at the cost of cash savings purchase power and the central bank just sit put and wait until inflation runs too hot to then increase rates that then cut way before inflation is on target. As we are having right now in basically every country on earth.

throw0101a• 4 months ago

I believe the broader reason for an inflation target is to increase the value of "doing something" as opposed to "doing nothing" with money.

'"Doing nothing" with money' is called hoarding.

What a lot of these 'purchase power destroyed' articles miss is that the loss only occurs if you literally put money under mattress or buried it in your backyard: i.e., paper money just sitting there.

But if you put the money in T-bills (US bonds ≤1y), CDs (in US), bonds, stocks (esp. index funds), real estate, your own business, then inflation is not only kept up with, but you're generally growing your pot. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.

Why should a dollar bill sitting in a drawer somewhere be expected to keep its value by doing nothing? Money is a social construct for convenient participation in society.

And if you think inflation is bad wait until you hear about deflation:

* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archi...

AndrewKemendo• 4 months ago

The Great Inflation of 1968–1982 alone accounts for 30.2% of all cumulative purchasing power destruction since 1914 — more than WWI and WWII combined. During this 15-year period, the CPI rose from 34.1 to 97.7, nearly tripling the price level.

In 1971, the United States ended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.

This allowed for the global reserve currency to float which allowed for global credit expansion at the cost of the dollar value but with the benefit of more overall dollars (monetary velocity increasing)

This is what politicians want because it makes the dollar printing machine the most powerful thing, hence why everyone hung on the fedchair words every few months.

So the USD is already hyperinflated but the price relative to other currencies is still high.

Once that price collapses (and it eventually will and increasingly soon) the entire US will look like the rust belt.

bloppe2• 4 months ago

The graph should really use a log scale. At this point, a 50% drop in value would look tiny on that graph with the linear scale.

skywhopper2• 4 months ago

This is a bizarre framing that totally misunderstands inflation, money, and macroeconomics.

WarmWash4• 4 months ago

The value of the dollar over time is largely meaningless unless you are a dollar investor (i.e. sit on lots of cash in consumer tier bank accounts). Generally once you have enough cash that this would meaningfully impact you, you are already beyond sitting on cash.

At the end of the day, the dollar or any other currency, is just a conversion tool for [value created] to [goods/services received]. A ratio of 3/1 is equivalent to a ratio of 300/100, even if 3 and 1 are 99% smaller than 300 and 100. The numerator and denominator can move out of sync, creating periods of strain and arbitrage while they equilibrate, but what really matters is how much xyz you get per hour of work at job abc. And overwhelmingly we are leagues beyond 1914 in that regard.

mothballed2• 4 months ago

It's meaningful because you pay capital gains on nominal increase in dollar value even if there is no real change in value. Inflation is thus a tax on realized non-gains at roughly 1/5th the cumulative inflation.

triceratops2• 4 months ago

Workers also pay more taxes when (or if) they get inflation-matching raises. Capital paying taxes on inflation gains isn't unfair.

WarmWash4• 4 months ago

I'd argue that's more of an issue with the tax code than a fundamental problem with inflation. In and ideal world we would be able to write off losses to inflation, I'm sure many financial geeks have griped about this before, heh

arkensaw• 4 months ago

I'm trying to read this and not feel like an idiot.

Can someone explain to me how post-covid is considered one of the 4 episodes?

it looks to me that the dips at 1933-1936 or 1956-1958 are much more significant - are these just "regular" inflation? Are we ignoring these because we can't tie them to some specific current event?

raincole3• 4 months ago

Appeal to readers' recency bias. Covid is the most recent big change for the readers so the article has to make it more significant than it actually was. If it only talked about things happened <40years people would be 'so what?' and bounce out.

hardlianotion• 4 months ago

I think probably the interest rate is higher, but the value as a proportion of the starting value on LHS is less significant, compared with the periods you mention. If you look at the monthly interest rates at the bottom, it seems to support this notion.

kingleopold3• 4 months ago

money supply increased more than all those during the covid.

d--b• 4 months ago

They make it sound like it’s a bad thing.

chistev• 4 months ago

What inspired Trump to do this? The Epstein files?

beeflet• 4 months ago

I think fuentes' theory holds merit: It's that in running for re-election trump was trying to avoid prison, so he was desparately looking for approval from many disparate and conflicting interest groups (some anti-war, some anti-immigration, some pro-immigration) one of which was pro-zionist. So not so much the epstien files but more just impending criminal charges in general (The epstien conspiracy voters were actually one of the interest groups trump wooed).

I also read an article here that suggested trump's bombing of iran during peace talks at the same time as israeli attacks established that if israel attacked then USA would also be a valid combatant (which wasn't the case previously). So this bombing of iran's nuclear facilities earlier was sort of a trap that made it so that israel could rope us into any conflict at any later time- which they did this time, they threatened to strike iran with or without us.

Lastly, I imagine that success in decapitating the venezuelan regime gave trump and his cabinet confidence in going to war.

This whole war seems good for israel but in the long term it doesn't really pan out in the long term for them either. It is sort of the cart leading the horse. There is a theory proposed by prof. Jiang (PredictiveHistory) that this war was catalyzed by a certain apocolyptic eschatology of jews/christians in a couple high places. Whether the Netanyahu or Trump adminstration is captured by this chohort or just pursing short term goals is hard to say, but this is the only explanation I can find for who benefits long-term from this action.

twodave• 4 months ago

The only thing sadder than AI-generated comments on human articles is human comments on AI-generated articles.

kilroy123• 4 months ago

To big ones:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

https://wtfhappened2012.com/

mothballed2• 4 months ago

The most notable anomalous event if you zoom back to more like 1814 instead of 1914 is that ever since the US completely decoupled from the gold standard, it switched into purely inflationary mode rather than often bouncing back. From the 1800-1900 pretty much the entire time was spent at worst 1/2 to 2x the average value. Far less variance than after the introduction of federal reserve and taking off the gold standard, where purchasing power was destroyed to something like <1/10th of the century average.

aglavine• 4 months ago

Fiscal deficit. That is the main reason by far of Dollar's destruction. Everything else is wrong or over-thinking.

hackthemack• 4 months ago

"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens." -- John Maynard Keynes

Booktrope• 4 months ago

Whoever wrote this article seems to think a strong dollar is fundamental to a strong economy. But, notice where it is on this timeline the only prolonged strengthening of the dollar that shows up. Yep, you've got it, the depth of the great depression. And, notice where the WWII and postwar weakening of the dollar led -- that's right, to in many ways the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen.

Because we try to figure out how things like "strengthening" and "weakening" of the dollar fit in, and we actually have policies much more intelligent than, weaking of the dollar! Collapse is imminent!

hintymad2• 4 months ago

And a strong currency usually means weak manufacturing. And I don't know how a country can be strong without a solid manufacturing sector. Like, when we a war breaks out, we ask our enemies to sell us components and medical key ingredients?

fakedang4• 4 months ago

Didn't know Switzerland was a "weak" manufacturer (currently one of the strongest currencies there is, also in wide use).

iso1631• 4 months ago

If you aren't self-sufficient in energy, food, and to a lesser extent raw materials, a weak currency means everything is expensive.

danesparza• 4 months ago

Why don't they refer to the 3rd 'episode' as Vietnam - since the timeline lines up pretty nicely with that downward slope (and it's more than just the 70's as is highlighted in the article)?

If seeing this graph has taught me anything it's that war is hell on many levels - including economically.

This article also doesn't seem to account for the median price of a single family home.

renewiltord• 4 months ago

You can pick arbitrary points and stick them on the graph. It appears that my family are the inflation stoppers. Calm periods correspond to weddings and childbirths in my family. As the first in the line to marry a Chinese person, I have broken the rule and my daughter’s arrival has triggered a dollar collapse.

The moon gods have spoken in the tea leaves and we have lost the Mandate of Heaven.

tasuki• 4 months ago

Shouldn't the first chart have a logarithmic scale on the vertical? I don't trust anything using linear scales where they're a bad fit...

LogicFailsMe• 4 months ago

And yet the feels surrounding $1M net worth have not been and likely will never be adjusted for this.

Spooky232• 4 months ago

Sure they will. Making “$100,000” used to be a crazy milestone. Not anymore.

Likewise, a millionaire isn’t a millionaire until about $10M.

tracker1• 4 months ago

- Shift back to exchange based taxes away from income taxes.

- Spin down the federal reserve, establish a US bank and adjust the self-loans against the future into a solid repayment plan at a minimal interest rate.

- Reestablished precious metal backing to core currencies (gold, silver, etc.)

- Establish constitutional amendment establishing non-living entities and restricting speech rights as such. If a CEO wants to donate personal funds, cool, no corporate backing to political organizations full-stop.

- Strong protections and some spending in favor of domestic security and production.

- Drop subsidy spending for GMO commodity foods and byproducts. Eliminate GRAS protections against any "food" that didn't exist in the US food supply before 1880. FDA acknowledgement when more than one region considers an engineered food product as unsafe, minimally processed animal and plant products excluded.

readthenotes1• 4 months ago

We are so much better off than in 1914 that it's ridiculous to even worry about the comparative value of an arbitrary unit of value exchange.

ck2• 4 months ago

would deficit spending $21 Trillion on war have anything to do with it?

https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...

tsoukase• 4 months ago

Currency purchasing power isn't a very meaningful metric. It should be accompanied by the level of wages, at least. Besides, you can't compare any consumer data of the pre-tech/pre-plastic period before the 50's with subsequent ones. The social and technological frames were immensely different.

Nifty3929• 4 months ago

The graph should be on a log scale. Inflation earlier from a higher value is magnified relative to inflation later from a lower value.

72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes

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