There’s a huge inflation tsunami heading towards us. The April CPI reading comes out tomorrow at 8:30 AM. Good thing official inflation measures exclude food, housing, gas, education and healthcare. We don't need to be able to afford those things.
Let’s look past the bullshit CPI which registered 2.6% for the March reading. The everyday items you and I consume are going up by much larger amounts than the FEDs favorite inflation gauge. Take housing prices for example, which everyone knows are going up at a crazy rate. February year over year increase was 12% nationally and shows no sign of slowing down. But the CPI doesn’t reflect this. The CPI tries to estimate housing inflation using “owner equivalent rent” which is what a homeowner would pay to rent their own house. The cost of the house is ignored in this equation, the focus being on the cost of the shelter it provides instead. That’s great, unless you want to buy a house.
The prices of just about everything that it takes to build that house are going up too. The price of a new lot to build on is up 11% YOY and will likely continue to climb as supply of new lots is down 20% in that same period. The materials that make up the home are up as follows:
Lumber: +67% YTD
Copper: +27% YTD
Gypsum: +7% YOY
Steel Mill Products: +18% YOY
Add in a shortage of construction workers, a national push for higher wages and ultra-low interest rates and housing shows no signs of becoming more affordable anytime soon. Fulfilment costs are going up across the board as well, due to numerous factors. Disruptions in the global shipping markets have led to price increases of 25-50% on shipping containers.
To compound the aforementioned issues, the prices of the commodities and inputs used to produce a broad range of goods are also increasing rapidly. Look at these increases in just the last month alone:
Cocoa: +2.5%
Coffee: +12.7%
Sugar: +13.6%
Lean Hogs: +6.3%
Rough Rice: +3.6%
Oats: +7.4%
Soybeans: +7.7%
Wheat: +18%
Corn: +18.5%
Farmers are now substituting wheat grown for human consumption as animal feed due to the huge increase in the price of corn. This feedstock inflation can trickle thru the butcher block and dairy isle and potentially increase prices of meat, chicken, milk, eggs and cheese, just to name a few.
In the recent earnings calls of several multi-national corporations the topic of pricing and supply chain issues was highlighted. Coke and Pepsi are both going to raise prices, and if you look at the price of sugar, the reason is obvious. P&G and Mondelez both announced intentions to do the same, and Kraft spoke about rising costs across it supply chains. Selling a smaller amount for the same price isn’t gonna cut it this time anymore. Prices are going up.
So, inflation appears to be working its way thru commodities markets and supply chains and will soon be knocking on the door. Could it be that the inevitable hangover from the money printer going BRRRRR is approaching? I have no idea, but the numbers are staggering. Don’t worry though, you likely won’t be affected. Unless you live inside, drive, eat, drink coffee or pop, shop online or have anything to do with those industries, you’ll be just fine!
It’s prime time for ₿itcoin.
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It is silver that will replace fiat, not another fiat backed by nothing.
The US government created all of the encryption on which crypto relies. Why would they give the power to communicate with unbreakable encryption to adversaries like China and Russia unless they had a back door?
And how do you (or anyone in the west) plan to compete with China’s mining operations? They make the miners and the coal to power them with slaves. Think you can obtain bitcoins cheaper than them? How will we compete with someone who can use slaves to print money?
Worse, our deep state adversary completely controls computers. The chips are spying on you, the OS is spying on you, the apps are spying on you. They know everything you do on any computer as you do it. Tying our money to these compromised devices and platforms is madness. We cannot trust any computer.
Why haven’t the banks suppressed crypto like they did gold and silver? For every ounce of gold there are 100 oz of futures contracts. For every ounce of silver there are 500 ounces of futures contracts. Most treat the price of a 1 oz futures contract (spot) as being equivalent to 1 oz in hand (spot + premium for instant delivery) when they are not the same. This creates an illusion of plenty when there is not plenty.
Crypto is up for the same reason Tesla is up. Speculative bubble driven by endless money printing. Good luck!
SPECTACULARLY incorrect.
There are many kinds of crypto schemes, and the Dr cryptocurrencies can be inspected by anyone. They are backed by MATH, the most impartial judge there is.
That said, I have 400 oz of silver 👌
Pure math might be what you say, but AES encryption designed by the US government then freely given out to their adversaries so they can use unbreakable encryption that the US government can't read isn't.
They obviously had a back door before ever releasing AES. Which means the government(s) with the back door can effectively "print" money by downloading the hash, instantly decoding it, and claiming it for themselves.
Gold and silver, by contrast, simply cannot be printed.
Most AES implementations are open source and the specifications isn't even that complex, you flip bits in blocks in a certain order and that's it. Basic binary math.
The back doors exist in the layers above, as long as you own the key and is fully confident that nobody else knows it then your data is safe. For instance, I'm pretty sure M$ and their proprietary crap system known as Windows is leaking encryption keys back home, they have keyloggers and a shitload of data is sent to "telemetry".
If you don't trust existing implementations it's easy to make your own. Using GNU+Linux and compiling from source is pretty safe tho.
The reason they let anyone use their technology such as TOR or encryption algorithms is basically because if they didn't, you'd immediately know that if someone is using TOR, you'd know it's a CIA agent. And that would ruin the whole purpose of building a huge anonymity network.
As for the hardware chips, look at the manufacturers, not all of them are Chinese, Samsung is South Korean for instance, Sony is Japanese, tho pretty much all the chips are made in Asia, not all are made in China.
If only silver was easy to obtain and bring home without getting robbed and to verify to avoid getting scammed. Any advice on that area? Silver is indeed an excellent store of value as long as you own it physically and know it's not fake.