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20% Inflation

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New Fed Chief Janet Yellen’s comments before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday were hard to take. Once again we have an academic telling us how to run a free market system, “someone that has never traded a horse in her life,” commented one client. Yellen feels 2% inflation is harmless. Savers do not. It’s debilitating when your dollars are worth 20% less in ten years. And that’s being kind. Economist Judy Shelton points out in The WSJ that we’ve been down this road before.

 

Then again, Ms. Yellen is credited with successfully convincing Alan Greenspan that mild inflation does little harm, and is actually a good thing. She was relatively new to the Fed Board of Governors in 1996, but Fed meeting transcripts reveal that Ms. Yellen talked then-Chairman Greenspan out of his goal of driving inflation down to zero. In true Keynesian fashion, she reasoned that workers want higher nominal wages even when higher prices negate them; better to accept the money illusion benefits of 2% inflation than to risk slipping into a deflationary spiral with rising unemployment.

It is ironic that concern for wage earners serves to justify money pumping by the Fed that ends up largely benefiting people who have hefty stock-market portfolios, especially at a time when “income inequality” is a major White House theme.

Perhaps one of our elected representatives on Capitol Hill can explain to Ms. Yellen that when the low-grade fever of perpetual inflation becomes a full-blown economic malady—when the next financial bubble bursts with horrible consequences for the real economy—average Americans will pay the biggest price.

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E.J. Smith

Editor-in-Chief
E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com.