Similar to August and September, the total national debt has not increased due to the current debt ceiling that’s in place. Similar to August, the Treasury has raided public retirement accounts to continue funding government spending (light green bar below).
Looking at the bigger picture, Covid has forever shifted the landscape of US Debt.
Is inflation transitory, as Federal Reserve Jerome Powell has claimed for months? Or are we on the verge of hyperinflation, as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently warned? In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks inflation, digs into the data, and concludes that it’s pretty clear we’re in an inflationary spiral.
The “transitory inflation” narrative has completely broken down. And now Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey has warned us.
Hyperinflation is coming.
This summer, Peter Schiff and Jim Rickards discussed the possibility of $15,000 gold. In a recent interview. economist Rafi Farber took this line of thinking to the next level, arguing the dollar price of gold could eventually hit infinity – meaning simply that the value of the dollar will go to zero.
March 23 was Peter Schiff’s birthday. It was also the day the Federal Reserve announced QE Infinity. So, Peter spent over three hours hosting a live videocast talking about the latest Fed moves, the potential impact on the economy and answering questions from viewers.
Peter said he was hoping to combat the rampant economic ignorance that is pretty much everywhere.
A paper by Scott A. Wolla and Kaitlyn Frerking for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis warns that the Fed’s own policy could lead to “economic ruin.”
The paper titled “Making Sense of National Debt” explains the pros and cons of national borrowing in typical Keynesian fashion. In a nutshell, a little debt is a good thing, but too much debt can become a problem.
But in the process of explaining national debt, Wolla and Frerking stumble into an ugly truth — Federal Reserve money printing can destroy a country’s economy.
Venezuelans have turned to illegally mining gold just to survive.
The Pemon people are native to the region containing Canaima National Park. If you saw the movie Up, you’re familiar with this area. The 500 million-year-old pillars of erosion in the park inspired scenery in the movie. The park also contains world-famous Angel Falls. But with hyperinflation gripping the country and the bolivar virtually worthless, people in the area have turned to digging up football-size mines in search of fragments of gold.
With hyperinflation gripping Iran and sanctions strangling the economy, Iranians are beginning to turn to gold to make everyday transactions, most notably to pay their rent.
The Iranian rial has depreciated rapidly since the US announced its withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and the reimposition of economic sanctions. After the US formally announced it was pulling out of the deal in May, the exchange rate peaked at around 45,000 rials to the dollar. But that official rate was only available to well-connected bankers, importers and businesses. Average Iranians were paying twice that. By July 29, money-exchangers in Tehran were charging around 100,000 rials for one dollar. Within 24 hours, it increased to 110,000 rials to the dollar.
