The dollar isn't an investment you're supposed to hold on to for 100 years; it's just a means of trading present value. The only cash people should have sitting around is what they need to live in the present and an emergency fund; all other cash should be invested, whether in physical or financial assets.
Well I just last year sold $2000 in confederate bills for $16789 after listing fees so I did well seeing as I had invested $0 in my uncle's estate! lol...Still have lots more as well....
Money is intended to be a portable storable means of saving value and making transactions.
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the dollar is worth LESS now than it ever has in history. it buys LESS SHIT, and wages have not kept pace. the dollar doesnt save and store value any more. it is useless as a money, and only works as a currency.
Money is intended to be a portable storable means of saving value and making transactions.
if i sell my motorcycle in san francisco for $1500 in gold in san francisco, get on a plane to japan and try to buy a roughly equally valued motorcycle in Tokyo, i can make that happen.
if i save that gold for 2 years and then try to buy a similar motorcycle in tokyo, ill get a better bike than expected. thanks fiat currency.
that same transaction in any fiat currency is unlikely to go smoothly, since over 2 years those $1500 bucks would have dropped like a stone in real purchasing power and thus the bike i bought in 1989 (for $300 bucks) will now cost me close to 1800 for the same fucking bike.
how much did your parent's first new car cost? how much does a similar new car cost now?
how much did a 2 br 1 ba house cost in 1990? how much does it cost now?
how much did a loaf of bread cost in 1990? how much now?
are you making 4x more money now than you were in 1990? or better yet, is the guy doing the job you had in 1990 making 4x more than you are now?
the dollar is worth LESS now than it ever has in history. it buys LESS SHIT, and wages have not kept pace. the dollar doesnt save and store value any more. it is useless as a money, and only works as a currency.
I auctioned mine in MS...google it for some good indications on value...mine are in pristine shape and this matters GREATLY in valuation
and why did "she" do this?
Says who, you? Money is just a means of transacting.
The purpose of fiat currency is not to store value.
The inflation rates for the past two years were 1.7% and 1.5%.
]Over those 2 years, your $1500 lost what, $50 in purchasing power? And that's assuming you held saved money as cash, which wasn't smart. You could have beaten the inflation rate in a CD; you could have beaten the inflation rate in the stock market; you could have beaten the inflation rate collecting dividends; you could have beaten the inflation rate by purchasing commodities like gold. That's exactly what people do.
You're repeating all of this nonsense again? $1 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as $1.78 today. The median wage in 1990 was about $28,000; the median wage today is about $50,000. $50,000/28,000 = 1.79. Wages kept pace with inflation, even or better for every quintile, as you know from our last inflation discussion.
so what youre saying is... the price you pay for a car is irrelevant, only the car salesman's pitch is important...The average new car in 1990 cost about $17,000; the average dealer incentive was $1,000, so $16,000. The average new car in 2012 cost about $30,000; the average dealer incentive was $2500, so $27,500. In real terms, a new car is $1000 less expensive than in 1990. If you had bought one in 2011, it would have been $2000 less expensive in real terms.
The median home price in 1990 was about $125,000. The median home price in 2012 was under $200,000--so housing actually got cheaper in real terms, by tens of thousands of dollars.
Bread is the only winner in your selection. The average price of a loaf of bread was 70 cents in 1990, $1.25 in 2013 dollars. The average price in 2012 was $1.41.
Now, let's work this out together. Let's say I pay $3,000 a year for the car and $18,000 a year for the house, and that I buy two loaves of bread per week for $150 over the year. In real terms over 1990, did I win or lose in the basket you put together? Yeah,I'm paying more for bread, but I'm paying substantially less for other goods. You don't need to make four times what people made in 1990, you just need to make 1.78 times as much. The median person does; every quintile does.
The dollar is worth less now than in 1990, yes, in the sense that it takes 1.78 times as many dollars to have equivalent purchasing power. But no, you're wrong, it doesn't buy less, because wages have kept pace with inflation, and that's a simple fact. That you keep repeating this "FOUR TIMES INCREASE!" nonsense when it's so blatantly false casts doubt on every contention about inflation you make. If you don't like inflation, fine, rant about it, but once you've deviated from reality and created your own facts your voice becomes hushed and meaningless.
That gold just keeps dropping.......![]()
the IMF, World Bank, the Brettton Woods Agreement signatories, every bank that ever was, every moneylender who ever clinked two coins together, every market that ever existed, every person who ever sold a thing and then hoped to buy another thing the next day, next week or next year, etc...
Really? Which inflation rate are you talking about? You seem to be talking about Core CPI, which is just one of the numbers BLS calculates; Core CPI excludes energy and food. But the other CPI numbers include everything, and that's where I got my numbers. My inflation rate excludes nothing.the inflation rate deliberately excludes fuel, food, housing, energy, etc etc. it is a means of measuring how well the makers of manufactured goods are doing, not a measure of how poorly the currency is retaining it's value.
so what youre saying is... the price you pay for a car is irrelevant, only the car salesman's pitch is important...
1990 Honda Accord DX : MSRP $12,145
~http://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/history.html
2013 Honda Accord DX: MSRP $23,350.
~http://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/
so in real terms, the same make and model now costs nearly double what it did in 1990.
ohh i see. you must mean the OTHER kind of inflation.
now see, theres where youre just spouting nonsense. Zillow has a "price history" and you can look at what a single house sold for in the past and what it sells for now. go ahead, check it out. the same house usually sells for 3-5X what it sold for in the late 80's or early 90's. youll be able to find sintkers, like burnt out husks, forclosed crackhouses, etc, so save that drama. a move in ready house sold first in 1984 for $107k is now $299K and it's just the first house i picked in sacramento (which is a seriously depressed market, one of the top 3 "investment opportunity markets" in the country
whole wheat bread in the early 90's cost ~$.99 now it pushes $4.50 same bread same store.
hushed and meaningless my ass. you can spit all the stats you liike, facts dont lie. everything costs 2-5x more now than the same shit did in the late 80's and early 90's because our currency is worth LES now than it was then. and wages have not increased at the same pace.
Oh, did you hear, besides being the only president to suspend Whitehouse tours, which didn't even happen during the Great Depression, is happening even though the dollar is stellar according to Tokeprep. Here it comes, Obama Phone is being considered by the administration for the chopping block too.
The hell? Snap!
I don't think the dollar is stellar. We could easily do a lot to improve our economy and reduce our deficits/debt, and that would be to our benefit.
But everything economic is relative. The simple truth is that, relatively speaking, the United States is still the best bet of any bet in the world. Europe? Total disaster right now, with the next crisis probably just waiting to surface. China? It's looking soft and a lot of people don't trust the data. Japan? Well, Japan's been Japan for 20 years now. All of this leaves some play room in US monetary policy, and that's exactly why they're playing.
The first mistake of economics is assuming that people always make rational decisions, since they obviously don't. Another mistake is to believe that people, in aggregate, will rationally consider the money supply and make economic decisions with that reality in mind. They don't. Doubling the number of dollars in circulation doesn't mean that inflation will be 100%--empirically it just doesn't work that way. Indeed, many economists are presently expressing concerns about deflation, not inflation. Some people think the Fed has been particularly aggressive precisely because inflation is so low. I don't think we're in the midst of a crisis, though.
Says who, you? Money is just a means of transacting.
The purpose of fiat currency is not to store value. The inflation rates for the past two years were 1.7% and 1.5%. Over those 2 years, your $1500 lost what, $50 in purchasing power? And that's assuming you held saved money as cash, which wasn't smart. You could have beaten the inflation rate in a CD; you could have beaten the inflation rate in the stock market; you could have beaten the inflation rate collecting dividends; you could have beaten the inflation rate by purchasing commodities like gold. That's exactly what people do.
You're repeating all of this nonsense again? $1 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as $1.78 today. The median wage in 1990 was about $28,000; the median wage today is about $50,000. $50,000/28,000 = 1.79. Wages kept pace with inflation, even or better for every quintile, as you know from our last inflation discussion.
The average new car in 1990 cost about $17,000; the average dealer incentive was $1,000, so $16,000. The average new car in 2012 cost about $30,000; the average dealer incentive was $2500, so $27,500. In real terms, a new car is $1000 less expensive than in 1990. If you had bought one in 2011, it would have been $2000 less expensive in real terms.
The median home price in 1990 was about $125,000. The median home price in 2012 was under $200,000--so housing actually got cheaper in real terms, by tens of thousands of dollars.
Bread is the only winner in your selection. The average price of a loaf of bread was 70 cents in 1990, $1.25 in 2013 dollars. The average price in 2012 was $1.41.
Now, let's work this out together. Let's say I pay $3,000 a year for the car and $18,000 a year for the house, and that I buy two loaves of bread per week for $150 over the year. In real terms over 1990, did I win or lose in the basket you put together? Yeah,I'm paying more for bread, but I'm paying substantially less for other goods. You don't need to make four times what people made in 1990, you just need to make 1.78 times as much. The median person does; every quintile does.
The dollar is worth less now than in 1990, yes, in the sense that it takes 1.78 times as many dollars to have equivalent purchasing power. But no, you're wrong, it doesn't buy less, because wages have kept pace with inflation, and that's a simple fact. That you keep repeating this "FOUR TIMES INCREASE!" nonsense when it's so blatantly false casts doubt on every contention about inflation you make. If you don't like inflation, fine, rant about it, but once you've deviated from reality and created your own facts your voice becomes hushed and meaningless.
I went to three of my regular haunts to buy some silver today. Couple of coin shops and pawn shops up in Raleigh. Left with the cash still in my pocket. They didn't even have any of the silver coinage. Apparently it really is just the paper that is being dumped. I've NEVER walked out of a coin shop without a couple ounces.