Personal Finance @lemmy.ml shortwavesurfer @monero.town 5 mo. ago

Inflation is higher than they would like you to believe.

The US government is telling everybody that inflation is 3.4% per year. That is not correct. Try 14.2% and that's about right. Source : gold/usd 1 year simple moving average.

21 comments

I might accept the premise that inflation is higher than officially reported, but I don't accept the relevance of your evidence in support of that premise.
- Speculation on the price definitely occurs, which is why I chose to use the one-year simple moving average instead. Measure it from January 1st, 2024, till today, and you see that it's risen 7.1%. So if inflation keeps up like it has been, and it appears to be, then it would be 14.2% higher by December 31st.
  
  I think you wildly misunderstood what the other commenter was trying to get at, namely that you are trying to extrapolate a gobal and relatively volatile value of a single material to the scale of the entire gobal economy. If for instance a major mine was forced to shut down then you would see a major increase in the price of gold, but no change to the economy as a whole outside of a small fraction of the aforementioned change making its contribution to the outputs of a few niche industries.
  
  Moreover if a commodity can work as a pure measure of inflation in the economy then we would expect the gobal price index of all commodities to provide a more accurate measure, right? Actually doing that relative to USD however actually shows minor deflation since Q3 2023, which itself saw a whopping 30% deflation between 2022 and 2023.
  
  Given these numbers do not seem at all indicative of my personal or observed change in the average price of goods and services across the entire economy, it would seem that commodity prices don’t have a significant direct correlation with inflation.
  
  Why do you think gold and inflation are related in any significant way? Nobody buys anything with gold, so I don't see how it's relevant.
Hey, I can play this game, too! The real inflation rate is closer to 150%. Source: Bitcoin was $27k last year, now it's $67k

My source sucks, but so does yours
- Buy bitcoin, fuck the govetnmyth
The US is saying 3.4% because inflation is based on a consumer price index. It's not a good metric because it doesn't account for housing, education, healthcare and most other major expenses.

However, gold is an awful metric for the value of the currency. No single product can be a good metric alone. And gold is famously effected by speculation. People buy gold when the future of the currency seems uncertain.
- Exactly. People buy gold when the future of the currency seems uncertain. And yet, the simple moving average of gold has risen 7.1% since January 1st of 2024. And so if inflation continues, at the pace it is, then it will be 14.2% by the time December 31st rolls around.
  
  Did the USD deflate significantly between 2012 and 2016? Your gold based metric says yes.
  
  I’ll accept without evidence that real inflation feels a lot higher than 3.4%, but proposing short term shifts in the price of gold, or any other single commodity as a better metric is just nuts.
  
  You’re speculating on what gold will be worth in six months. You have no idea if the current trends will hold or not. It’s not like the value of gold over the course of the past hundred years is a steady consistent climb. Past performance isn’t always indicative of future results.
So the government has gotten every university and financial institution on the planet to go along with their ruse? I mean after faking a moon landing that sounds trivial.

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