Peter Schiff: There Is Only One Type of Inflation

When talking heads and politicians talk about inflation, they tend to make distinctions between “food inflation,” or “energy inflation,” or “wage inflation.” In this clip from his podcast, Peter Schiff explains that this isn’t the right way to look at inflation. In fact, there’s only one type of inflation. And the Federal Reserve is the source of it.

They always have some kind of word that they want to use to preface inflation. But that really just lets the Federal Reserve off the hook for creating the inflation. Because if they say, ‘We have food inflation,’ well, now people want to blame the farmers, right? They’re doing something. If it’s ‘wage inflation,’ well, let’s blame those workers, or let’s blame the unions, or whatever it is that they want to blame it on. But the real blame belongs with the Fed.”

Pundits and politicians often talk about “commodity inflation.” But Peter said there is no such thing. Individual commodity prices can rise and fall. Certain commodity prices can spike. But that’s not inflation.

The only way that all prices could go up is if the Fed creates the inflation. Because if there are supply bottlenecks in one particular commodity and the price of that commodity goes up, the price of some other commodity is going to go down, or some other service, to offset that because there’s only a certain amount of money in the economy, and if you have to spend more on one thing, then you’ve got to spend less on something else. So, the only way you’re going to get the price of everything going up is if the government is creating inflation.”

This is exactly what the Federal Reserve is doing.

And that’s exactly why we’re seeing widespread rising prices.

The central bank has created trillions of dollars out of thin air over the last 18 months. This is the precise definition of inflation.

As economist Milton Friedman once put it, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

An increasing money supply means more dollars chasing roughly the same amount of stuff. As a result, prices rise. As economist Daniel Lacalle explained, “More supply of money directed towards scarce assets, be it real estate or raw materials. The purchasing power of money goes down.”

The bottom line is you never want to say “wage inflation” or “goods inflation.” It’s just inflation.

It’s monetary inflation. That’s all it is. That’s what’s being inflated — the supply of money. And so that’s why we’re seeing prices going up.”

Peter said part of the problem is a lot of the people in the financial media don’t even know what inflation is. The question is why don’t they know the real meaning of inflation?

That has to do with the success of the government’s propaganda campaign to confuse the public and the media as to the true definition of inflation so that they don’t realize what the source is. Because once you properly define inflation, then there’s only one source, and that’s the US government and the Federal Reserve. The US government runs the budget deficits, and then the Federal Reserve monetized those deficits — prints more money. So, both the Fed and the government work together to create that inflation.”