This Hasn’t Happened Since the Great Depression
Heresy Financial: 5-15-2023
For most of human history, the money supply’s average growth rate was around one and a half percent. This is because money was gold.
For thousands of years. And so, if you wanted more money, you would either just sell something to get money or you would have to go dig it out of the ground.
You might think, why would everybody not just dig money out of the ground? That is because that costs money to do that. So, you will not do that if it takes you more than a dollar to get a dollar’s worth of gold out of the ground. Because of this, the growth rate in the total supply of gold was stable over time, around one and a half percent.
But with the invention of fiat currency, this game changed. Suddenly, the money supply could expand at record paces without anything forcing it to contract again.
But something is happening today that has not happened since the Great Depression. The money supply is contracting again, and it is shrinking faster than it has shrunk since the Great Depression.
So why is the money supply contracting so quickly today? What are the consequences of this? And most importantly, what will the Fed’s response to these consequences be?
Timecodes
0:00 Introduction
3:05 How Money Used to Work
5:32 The Great Depression
9:00 How Money Works Today
10:26 Where is the Money Going
13:03 Consequences
15:56 Policy Response
