RLL 53 Inflation, It's Back

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You're listening to Radio Looks Lucid, I'm your host Steve Matthews. Thanks for joining me for episode 53. The title of today's episode is

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Inflation, It's Back. Well before we get into our main topic today,

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I just wanted to say welcome to everybody. Thanks for joining me here for those of you on the live stream and also for those of you listening to the podcast, great to have you here.

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Well you know it's officially spring here in Cincinnati and now

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I mean I know that that officially from a calendar standpoint it was spring a few weeks ago right I mean they had what

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March 21st I guess that's the what they call the vernal equinox where night and day are the same length.

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Well that may be what the official you know the weather people or what have you would call the official start of spring but for me actually the official start of spring is the neighbor's frogs.

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So what am I talking about well I don't know it's probably been I don't know at least 10 years

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I would say where there are these these frogs in my neighbor's yard and of course

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I guess they go they go and they hibernate I suppose in the winter and then every spring they they come out and they come out at night and they start their whirling and croaking sound and all of this and and it sounds like I'm living in the

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Okefenokee swamp. I think there's actually only a couple of these frogs over there but they come out every year and they make racket all spring and all summer long and then they finally go dorm at some time in the fall and then they come back out the next year.

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Well just this week they lo and behold yeah I was uh was out out in the backyard and sure enough

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I started hearing these frogs going and you know these things will go and and they make noise uh pretty much a good chunk of the the way through the night.

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Now eventually I guess they go to sleep but uh or quiet down at any rate but uh but they're back and so I I know it's it's officially spring here in Cincinnati because of our neighbor's frogs.

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Well I wanted to talk to you uh a bit today here about uh about inflation and I'm going to get to that message in just a minute but I was watching something earlier and I I just I had had to comment on in fact it was while I was was kind of preparing a little bit for for tonight's show

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I I happened to uh catch a an episode of of Tim Pool.

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I don't know if you've ever seen uh Tim Pool he does uh he's he's a YouTuber he's got a actually a very big channel he does uh um usually multiple videos a day he he's a

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I guess you'd call him a news commentator uh and uh he's uh he's very he's a young guy

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I think he's in his in his 30s and he's built already quite a uh quite a following and just seems to be growing and growing very quickly but this one particular video that he had he was it was titled

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Get Woke Go Broke and and it was about this um this a new uh

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Walt show on the Disney streaming channel it's a it's a superhero show you you may know

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I mean if you you follow any of the the Disney stuff or you follow the like the Marvel superhero the the

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Marvel Cinematic Universe they call it Walt Disney Company bought Marvel Comics a number of years ago now if you're not a comic books fan maybe that doesn't really mean much to you but but Marvel Comic Books they they developed a lot of the the really famous characters in comic book history you know they got

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Spider -Man and and uh what Iron Man and um you know the

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Avengers the thing things of this sort and you know they they have had a of course a huge run

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I guess I guess probably going back maybe almost 20 years when they made the the very first uh

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Spider -Man movies now I mean I say if you're not a comic book fan maybe maybe that doesn't interest you a whole lot but but I think maybe that this this might interest you even even if you're not a comic book fan and the the reason that I say that is because comic books and if if you don't follow this stuff this may be surprising to you but comic books have gotten very woke here in recent years now when

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I was a kid I have to confess I was a little bit of a comic book nerd and and I I loved

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Spider -Man I really did I mean I I truly uh I enjoyed reading those and and I I really enjoyed even the movies that they came out

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I'm talking here about the original Spider -Man movies these were done about 20 years ago uh starring Tobey Maguire in the title role of Spider -Man and and I thought those movies really captured the comic book really wonderfully well and and they were you know like the comic book was fun and in the movies were a lot of fun too but comic books have changed a lot in the last 20 years and they're they're not as much fun and they they've gotten very woke they've gotten very progressive in their politics and they really beat you over the head with it and unfortunately uh

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Disney has has really been one of the big drivers of that uh in in the

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Marvel Cinematic Universe and I I've got this friend of mine who's a big comic books fan it's kind of funny because he's about my age he's a little bit younger than I am but he's close to my age and and he's he's never gotten over his comic book thing and he's a big collector and you know he buys these things and sells them and does all this stuff has a lot of fun with it but but he and I have have talked a lot um about uh about wokesterism and and all the and how woke the comic books have gotten and not just the comic books but also movies and and so much else that's in in pop culture and really it's it's the the whole woke agenda has just has ruined uh comic books it has ruined the superheroes it's uh you know wokesterism has has ruined star wars you know the the wokesters are in the process of ruining baseball and in just destroying you know just a whole huge swaths of of culture and and making to the point where there's really nothing there's no place to run there's no place to hide you know no matter what it is you you see or do you're beating over the head with this sort of marxist progressive um political agenda and what the tim pool was talking about in this particular show is there was a a new it's a new series superhero series is being put out by disney and what's interesting is

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I guess on these streaming services these executives they they have a way of uh of tracking you know you know not only how many people are watching but also if people drop you know if people are watching a program and they stop watching and and there's this one particular program that that there was a in fact

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I think it was the second uh maybe the second uh episode of this particular series where there was a very uh sort of woke uh kind of racially charged scene in in one of in in this program and people just turned it off in droves and that was why the title of this particular uh episode that timbo pool did he called it you know get woke go broke and and that's kind of a saying that that sometimes people use you know you get woke you know you drive off your customers and therefore you go broke now

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I don't know I I'd like to believe that that's true because some of this this stuff that that companies do is is really deeply offensive and I I remember a few years ago there was an ad you know we were talking about how you know

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I mentioned how um you know wokesterism has has destroyed superheroes it's destroyed star wars destroying baseball it's it's destroying companies it's destroying things like shaving cream for pete's sake you know there was a item was maybe five years ago or so Gillette the the razor manufacturers you know they ran this series of ads that that was incredibly insulting to men and I used

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Gillette you know I had Gillette razors I had Gillette shaving cream you know and and it it was it was a good product

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I mean I used it I liked it and I never really thought about even changing but after I saw that those particular commercials

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I stopped buying it I said I'm not going to buy products you know from people who hate me you know

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I don't need to be lectured by my by my uh my shaving cream manufacturer and I I went and I got something else

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I've used Barbasol ever since then you know I found Schick razors you know I mean yeah I'm not going to pay for this stuff

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I'm not going to pay people who insult me it's as simple as that and I think that's one of the ways that that people are going one of the most effective ways really maybe about the only effective way that as uh as consumers or as as fans of comic books or fans of sports or what have you that we can inflict you know send a message you know inflict a little bit of pain on these companies that um really uh really insult us you know

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I'm not going to sit here and allow a razor company to just insult me and then go out and just buy their product like nothing happened

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I mean that's that stuff actually really does matter and I find it offensive so anyway uh that that in fact

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I'm going to go ahead I'm going to put the uh uh maybe I'll put the uh the link to that particular show in in the show notes here because it is pretty about a 15 minute video so it's not a real super long video but I think you might find it interesting and if you haven't seen

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Tim Poole before I think you might even uh enjoy his work now I don't know that he's necessarily a Christian I'm not saying that but but I mean he usually has some at least interesting takes on some things and I think gives you an opportunity to to at least uh he has a fresh take on on stuff you know he he's not a not on a network he's got his own servers he's got his own website and all of this stuff so he's he's insulated himself pretty well from uh some of the cancel culture that's out there and of course there are a lot of people that would like to see him canceled but he's actually grown a pretty substantial audience of people who um at the very least are anti -woke maybe maybe let's put it that way so you may want to check that out so as I said

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I'm going to go ahead and put a put a link in the show uh show notes here for you just in case you you find it uh if you haven't seen him before I'd invite you to go ahead and at least check him out

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I think you might enjoy his show now what I really wanted to talk about here today's uh the the subject of today's talk

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I wanted to talk about inflation and because I I think not only do we have a current a lot of inflation going on right now or at least what's popularly called inflation and I'm gonna gonna get to that in just a minute um we've got a lot of that going on right now

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I think there's a whole lot more of that coming on the way so I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about inflation about what it is where it comes from and and also talk a little bit about what the bible has to say about inflation that might come as a bit of a surprise to you you know a lot of times we don't think of the bible having a lot to say about monetary policy but the bible actually does have a lot to say about money so let's take a look at a few things here in fact let me

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I'm gonna go ahead and share a screen here with you hopefully you can see that here's an article in fact this is from CNBC today yeah it's from Friday April the 9th and here's a headline it says

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U .S. producer prices surge in March that's a short article here but let's let's read through a little bit of it

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U .S. producer prices increased more than expected in March resulting in the largest annual gain in nine and a half years fitting with the expectations for higher inflation as the economy reopens amid an improved public health environment and massive government funding the producer price index for final demand jumped one percent last month after increasing one half percent in February the

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Labor Department said Friday at 12 months through March the PPI that is the producer price index surged 4 .2

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percent that was the biggest year -on -year rise since September 2011 and followed a 2 .8 percent advance in February economists called

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Reuters called by Reuters had forecast the PPI increasing by a half percent in March and jumping to 3 .8

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percent year -on -year the report was delayed after the Bureau of Labor Statistics website crashed okay so let's go and decipher a little bit of all that so what it's saying is that the prices increased jumped one percent during the month of March now if you annualize that suppose that prices went up one percent each month for an entire year so for 12 months well you'd be talking about a 12 percent annualized rate of inflation you know and that kind of reminds me a little bit of some of the the really severe inflation or so -called inflation that went on when

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I was a kid I mean I remember back in the 1970s I'm old enough you know I grew up and I was born in the 60s and I grew up and we kind of became started to become aware of things in the 1970s and some of my earliest memories as a kid from watching the news and yeah

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I was kind of a little bit of a news geek even way back then I'm almost embarrassed to say that but some of my earliest memories from from that particular time period were the discussion about inflation in the 1970s there was massive inflation and everybody was talking about it it was a great big political point of discussion with the presidents and presidential candidates you know they

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I think it was Gerald Ford if I remember correctly he had this oh he had like a political slogan it was it was

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WIN W -I -N and it was a it was an acronym it's in WIN the W -I -N it stood for whip inflation now you know and and you know it kind of showed him

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I think maybe he was holding a baseball bat I guess he was going to go out and beat up inflation with a baseball bat

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I don't know but it was politics anyway that was Gerald Ford when he was president or maybe running for president again it's it's been a while and I didn't look it up and research it here but I do remember something like that associated with Gerald Ford but yeah it was a very serious problem in the early 70s when

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Nixon was in the was president he actually imposed wage and price controls because prices were going so crazy he opposed wage and price controls which of course what that resulted in was massive shortages of goods and services that would that would that created a major problem and even even on into the the

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Carter administration the late 1970s I remember things got really bad and Carter took office in 77 and he was a one -term president he was elected in 1976 and then he lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan and during Carter's term in office the they came up with something and I don't know who developed this

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I don't know maybe some maybe some economist or maybe somebody in a in the news media

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I don't know where it came from but but they call it the misery index and in the misery index was the the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate and and that was the misery index and and and you know both of them were quite high there was a lot of unemployment there was was a lot of inflation and during that time and and of course

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Reagan that was one of the things Reagan was able to play on in 1980 he came out and you know he asked people are you better off today than you were four years ago and of course one of the things that people look back on they said well goodness no because you know inflation's running wild you know we've got you know all kinds of economic problems and and that was one of the things that convinced people to to vote for Ronald Reagan over over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election that whole decade of the 1970s was it was a time of tremendous rising prices now we're getting a lot of that going on right now for example

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I just recently bought I buy through Amazon the these these k -cups you know for the

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Keurig machines so I bought some coffee and I'll buy a kind of buy a bulk package of these things and you know every few months and I started running low this was right at the end of March early

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April so I went and I ordered some I went to order some and the price of this thing was was really high

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I thought I don't remember the price of this coffee being so much I thought well that can't be right and you know maybe

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I'm ordering the wrong thing by accident whatever well I went back in in my order history and I looked and sure enough when

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I had bought this the last time I bought it was back in early December so we're talking about just four months ago here okay well what

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I found out is that from early December until around the first of April the the price of this coffee had gone up over 23 percent 23 percent good grief you know

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I remember in in fact it's kind of interesting because it brought back some some memories about the 1970s one of the areas where inflation showed itself the most was in commodities you know things such as you know oil coffee sugar products you know

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I say commodities of this sort they just soared in price you know and here we see again this this tremendous increase in the price of coffee

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I give you another example of rising prices here lumber lumber is hitting record high prices in fact

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I was talking to dad today and he said that he stopped by the local home depot and he wanted to go in and price out he wanted it was thinking about buying a fence post well last year

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I remember I helped him install a fence post because uh the uh one of the the posts in the fence in their yard it uh it rotted and needed to be replaced so so yeah he got this four by four fence post the thing was

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I don't know probably about maybe eight feet long something like that and you know it was a four by four four fence post well when he bought the one last year

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I think it was oh he's told me it was about fourteen dollars this is last summer of summer 2020 well he went and priced one out now and the uh the price of of the that that exact same item right now was

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I think 32 dollars so I mean it was up over um it hit it more than doubled you know in a period of about you know maybe eight or nine months now that's extraordinary and that's that's what's happening with uh with lumber

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I mean it's just going up by leaps and bounds and so there's two things you know coffee that's a commodity lumber there's another commodity and they're soaring in price

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I mean this reminds me very much of what I remember as a kid in the 1970s now when you talk about prices going up you know whether it's coffee or lumber what have you you know we generally speaking um you know we talk about uh that being inflation you know we say oh you know these prices are going up that's inflation but that's actually not true and that may surprise you um that that inflation and rising prices are not the same thing rising prices are not inflation rising prices are the result of inflation so let me explain this a little bit here and here's

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I'm going to give you a few different uh slightly different but but basically the the same definitions of of inflation now one very common definition of inflation and I'm not sure who said this uh it's you you hear a lot of economists say that I I'm not sure who's credited with actually phrasing it this way but one definition of inflation is this too many dollars chasing too few goods so that's that's one way of talking about inflation another and this is maybe a little bit more a little bit more formal definition of of inflation is this and I got this out of a of Webster's seventh new collegiate dictionary this is a dictionary that's published back in the 1960s and I purposely bought it

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I bought this used and it's a really a wonderful dictionary it's a great little uh you know desk reference uh kind of a dictionary um and it was written before all the the woakster uh woaksterism and political correctness and all this other stuff so that's why

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I really do like the uh like that uh that particular edition of of the

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Webster's dictionary that's why I use it a lot but here's the definition that they gave uh quote an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods resulting in a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level now this definition of of inflation really kind of gets us to the heart of the matter notice what it says it doesn't say that rising prices are inflation it says that that inflation is an increase in the volume of money and credit so what inflation is is is the growth of the money supply inflation is not rising prices inflation is when the the amount of money available in economy expands very rapidly and abnormally and when that happens one of the results is rising prices so inflation is something that takes place in the supply of money and that results in prices going up now let me i'm gonna i'm gonna share uh do a screen share here with you as well here let me show you something um hopefully you can see that here this is a chart that was published by the uh oh it's put out by the the

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St. Louis Fed the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank and uh the St. Louis Federal Reserve they put out lots of uh lots of charts and things like this and this particular chart if you take a look at this is the is it's called the the

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M1 money stock it's it's one particular measure of the supply of money now there are different uh different measures of money supply but i think this one will give you a good sense of just exactly what's going on with how much money has been created very recently now this chart if you go back if you look over here on the the right hand side or the left hand side of the chart it goes back actually to January of so this chart actually goes back uh what uh 62 years so it's a it gives you a pretty good sample here and you can see going here 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 you know you can see you have a slowly upward sloping line here and it starts to pick up a little bit here you know 1980 1985 here's 1990 here's 1995 here's 2000 um here's uh here's 2005 here's the the the great recession the 2008 financial crisis and you can see it takes a little bit of an inflection it starts growing a little bit faster and this is just the again this is just the amount of the the amount of dollars that are in existence so you can see it's starting to pick up here and then look what happens last year this is

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February 2020 here right when it right at right at the base of this thing and then it just shoots up it just just shoots up like a rocket goes almost straight up here uh and this is you know beginning in you know

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I guess what uh March or so uh in fact yeah because back in March of 2020 you might remember that's when

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Congress passed what they called the CARES Act C -A -R -E -S Act and that was the package and I don't remember what the actual uh amount of the spending was

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I want to say it was like four four trillion six trillion some kind of crazy thing like that some some huge amount of money and you can just see the the the the money supply just shoots up like a rocket and it levels off a little bit here but you can still see it's increasing very quickly and and that is just just here within just you know just and so here we are right now the the chart here it ends in what uh

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February 2021 so so a couple months ago so you can see we're just on a very rapid uh upward sloping curve here the amount of money so let's go back to that definition so so you know the definition of inflation is an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and you can see what's happening here you can just see the amount of money just explodes uh here over the past 12 months

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I mean it's it's just it's unbelievable now not only have we had an explosion in the amount of of money that has been created by the

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Federal Reserve you know when when when money supply increases it's always it's it's something you know this is something that starts you know with the

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Federal Reserve not only do we have this massive increase of money printing by the

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Federal Reserve but we've also had a reduction in in the number of goods and services available now of course when you read the the headlines you know they say oh due to COVID you know the economic activities plunged by such and such you know well

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COVID had absolutely nothing to do with plunging economic activity the economic activity that's plunged over the past year has been a result of the government's overreaction to COVID you know

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I think that uh I saw somebody today he was was I'm not going to get this exactly right but he talked about the government's uh overreaction to COVID you know he described it as as pretending that a virus that survived by 99 .97

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percent of the people is is the equivalent of Ebola you know and that the desire to breathe freely is is murder yeah that's that's the way the politicians have treated

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COVID and they have destroyed our economy over the past year I mean quite deliberately so I mean not only have they printed money like crazy but they've also decreased the number of goods and services available out there so what you have is you have too many dollars chasing too few goods and you're seeing this explosive rise in prices again it's the it's the rise in prices is the result of the explosion in the monetary printing and you could also say the reduction in in the the number of goods and services in our economy so that that's what we going on here and all of this has been created you know by by government it's uh it it's been created by government fiat it has been created by the government overspending and by the federal reserve printing all the money to make to uh to drive all of this this deficit spending it's created massive problems it's created a monster and and the thing is we're just getting started with this

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I think you're going to see much more uh inflation the money supply and I think we're going to be seeing a great deal more uh in the way of rising prices now one thing that's worth interesting here as I as I think

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I had mentioned earlier um is uh is the bible actually has quite a bit to say about inflation and if you read the bible and you apply the bible and what it has to say about money

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I think one of the things that that one of the inevitable conclusions is that god hates the federal reserve's monetary policy god hates inflation because inflation is a form of theft it's a form of taking property that is not yours and let's uh take

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I just want to take a look at at a couple of representative passages here from the bible there's just a very a couple of short verses here here's one from deuteronomy this is 25 13 says you shall not have in your big bag differing weights a heavy and a light and you see something very similar to that expressed in proverbs this is proverbs 11 1 dis uh excuse me dishonest scales are an abomination to the lord but a just weight is his delight now you think about the way business was transacted back in back in biblical times what they did if you went to pay for something you had to weigh out a certain amount of typically silver silver was the the most common form of money think about say like when abraham and I think this is in genesis 23 when when sarah died when his wife sarah died he bought a field in which to bury her and the the genesis 23 it says that that abraham weighed out 400 shekels of silver the silver of the merchant and and what they did is they they had a balance and and they would put counterweights uh in in the balance that would represent a certain certain weight of uh have a certain weight and then they would would put silver in it until until those those balanced out and and when uh of course one of the ways people would cheat is they would have heavy weights and they would have light weights so if if you were going to pay somebody say you were purchasing something you know maybe you would have a a weight that was light and you would say oh well you know this represents you know 10 shekels of silver but you know maybe it was actually lighter than what 10 shekels actually were and and that way you would would weigh out less silver than than you um than you claimed that you were weighing out uh you know we use like the the monetary unit think of the monetary unit in in the old testament was the shekel i mean we're all probably familiar with that and even in uh in current day israel they the the israeli monetary unit they call it the shekel some things we talk about saving our shekels you know as a as a sort of a slang term for for saving money well a shekel very interestingly was was a weight the the word shekel is related to the hebrew word shakal shakal is a verb and it means to weigh it means way um and shekel is is derived from that so so it's it really implies a weight of something and usually when we were talking about shekels you're talking about maybe shekels a a weight of silver or or a weight of gold uh was typically the uh the with the monetary metals in the old testament and of course they uh throughout history have uh have been the uh the the only really two principally used monetary metals uh at any rate and in both gold and silver are are wonderful forms of money they they fulfill all of the the uh they they have all the properties that you would want in honest money but what these people would do back in the old testament as i said they would misrepresent the money because they would say oh well you know uh this is a a 10 shekel weight but maybe the the the weight was actually lighter than that and so when they would would pay people out you know they wouldn't have to put as much silver on the other hand if you were receiving payment let's say somebody was buying something from you maybe you would want to put a heavy weight in the scale so they would have to weigh out more more silver than than what what the actual honest value was and in in the you know that theft they're stealing they're they're misrepresenting the the weight of uh the weight of silver and of course that's exactly what our our modern central bankers do is they they misrepresent the the dollar monetary unit you know they they you know we the federal reserve issues all of these dollars but they continue to devalue those dollars over time now back in the old days they would uh you know what they would do is of course the the fraud was all done at the point of sale now with our uh in in modern times a little bit more subtle about that um you know instead of of having differing weights uh differing weights and measures you know what we do is we just devalue the the monetary unit slowly over a period of time and the federal reserve has been in business since 1914 and during that time the dollar the the currency unit of the