Oil is perishable.
1) Wealthy + Paranoid + Stupid. They'd rather keep their money in sovereigns under their mattress, than put it into any sort of productive economic activity. On a long term, especially in the US, you could pretty much throw darts and build a portfolio that competes with, or beats, inflation.
2) Conspirational: "fiat currency is a grand scheme to undermine our savings for (insert nefarious bugaboo of the day)"
3) Arguably a subset of 2) but Apocalypse Enthusiast. "When civilization crumbles, the obvious trade unit won't be something like grain, alcohol, or bullets, but my bags full of low-grade silver dimes! I'll be King of the Wasteland!"
I mean, I'm fucked. I've effectively lost between 10-20% of my purchasing power out of what ultimately equates to a relatively small sum in the first place because my time horizon was pretty small, I put a trust fund together for myself. Whole I was doing this bond yields were negative, and had been for a long while, and I'd posit they still are (last I looked the $1 pound loaves at Walmart were $1.50). I just did not and do not have the buffer money for investing, not to mention a need for liquidity and possible penalties. It would be nice to have something more stable. Of course, Au and Ag haven't yet reared their imaginary powers yet in any case, though many portend they will.
Ideally though, an ounce of gold is an ounce. But a dollar can be anything. The question is one of making gold, silver, or some other fixed-quantity, portable, arbitrarily valuable substance into legal tender, right?
How exactly is it not? Inflation = stealing value from people, that they have already created, time-limiting their spending power so that there's no way to actually save money in the long-term.
Money printing is theft, indirect taxation without consent.
The idea is that you'd save by investing into productive enterprises (and or government bonds) obviously that doesn't necessarily function as well as one would hope for but it's an better solution than hoarding cash/gold/bitcoin/etc.
Besides equities? Besides TIPS?
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tips.asp
Do you literally keep bills under your mattress or buried in your backyard? There's your problem.
No, there's not my problem. The problem is that the government keeps printing money, so my bills under my mattress or buried in my backyard keep dropping in value. The fact that there are securities that are literally called "Inflation-Protected" as an antidote to that only serves as a proof of the original problem.
> But you can save money!
No, you can invest money. But investing should not be mandatory just to keep your wealth from rotting.
Except that it doesn't. Money is created by private banks through credit (loan, mortgage) creation:
* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
> […] so my bills under my mattress or buried in my backyard keep dropping in value.
Yes, this is a feature: the discouragement of the non-productive uses of capital and hoarding à la Scrooge McDuck.
> No, you can invest money.
Most people actually save and do not invest:
* https://www.pragcap.com/saving-is-not-the-key-to-financial-s...
I sincerely doubt that "disouragement of the non-productive uses of capital" is the main reason for inflation. Linear tax on having money would do much better. Besides, except for a pathological example where scarcity of money causes deflation, why would it matter if someone is hoarding money?
If they're saving for something that costs e.g. 10 years wage, "hoarding" money is the only way they'd ever save that much. But with constant inflation, it's basically impossible - the only way to "save" money for something that expensive is to take a loan... Which again seems to lead back into banks' pockets. Who actually hoard money.
The game seems rigged, and all "explanations" for inflation just sound like bad lies given by Wall Street brokers high on coke.
I think this characterization is incorrect.
imagine writing this as ironic mockery during an ongoing inflation crisis.
It's never a "they're targeting a number that they believe in good faith will maximize economic activity on a national level", it's always "devaluing my existing holdings gives $boogeyman_ethnic_or_political_group an advantage" like you're somehow prohibited from investing.
Yes, direct trade may definitely be grains, alcohol or bullets - but as soon as economies more complex than a self sufficient farm village crop up, eventually some form of token will be required.
For that, historically gold and silver have been the established tokens of choice for millennia, and even today's currencies are backed by insane amounts of gold in central bank vaults - it's not a bad assumption per se to think that gold and silver will outlast even our modern civilization. Come to think of it, most of the world's currencies sans the Swiss Franc and the US dollars are barely decades old.
We're already seeing a switch from the US dollar as the universally accepted international reserve and trading currency - only 60% of reserves and 40% of trades are valued in dollars, mostly towards the Euro and, in smaller amounts, yen, yuan and a bit of Francs. Think forward a few decades... what humans create can vanish in a very short time.
And I don't understand your second point either. Your savings have most definitely been undermined. Your nominal wages might be up, but your purchasing power is way down since after the stimmys. To calculate the difference, compare how many hours you'd have to have worked in the past to how many hours you'd have to work now to achieve the same standard of living.
Maybe cut out the pretentiousness and dismissiveness and listen to what people who are generally concerned about you and your purchasing power are saying.
See also the amount of deflation that has occurred over the decades:
It forces you to invest it productive assets. What social value is there in locking away wealth in non-productive forms?
Buffett in 2011:
> Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
> Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
> Beyond the staggering valuation given the existing stock of gold, current prices make today’s annual production of gold command about $160 billion. Buyers – whether jewelry and industrial users, frightened individuals, or speculators – must continually absorb this additional supply to merely maintain an equilibrium at present prices.
> A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
* https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf
What social good does encouraging hoarding attain?