oxfouzer t1_iv70cp2 wrote on November 5, 2022 at 8:08 PM

Reply to comment by ArkyBeagle in The company WHAM-O (known for producing toys) also had an extremely limited run of firearms under the brand name WAMO by Doobliheim

I’m so dubious on Fed monetary policy. It’s clearly been a 100-year failure. I do “silver math” with lots of stuff and it’s almost always right. Like a Sears home built in 1920 - the purchase price when adjusted with “silver math” comes out to almost exactly its current market value. CPI calculator had it at half.

And yeah, the hunt brothers saga is a bit of a boone, but if you average around it just a little then things still fall into place.

Basically, my contention is that current CPI metrics basically always indicate things as being worth half of what they really are. Because the people who control those numbers are incentivized for it to do so.

ArkyBeagle t1_iv744wi wrote on November 5, 2022 at 8:35 PM

> It’s clearly been a 100-year failure.

I'm less sure of that than you are. I made the mistake of reading ( most of ) "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960" and the various panics and crashes of the 19th century were a big problem. Some of that is having money denominated in metals, some of it was stubborn attachment to other ideology.

Also - I suspect that the "Bernanke Put" worked great. That's more or less what the Fed was designed for - it was inspired by JP Morgan's ending of the Panic of 1907. Morgan died in 1913 so that avenue was lost. I think it shows well just how important an historical figure he was, regardless of any negative perception of him.

> Like a Sears home built in 1920 - the purchase price when adjusted with “silver math” comes out to almost exactly its current market value. CPI calculator had it at half.

Interesting. I'm just hoping that is not a coincidence.

I did find this:

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/3351/commodity-silver/26743/consumer-price-index-sa-yoy-silver

I'm not 100% sure there's always been signal there. But the 10 and 5 year '"breakeven" rates seem pretty stable ( which is literally half of the dual mandate ). Does that mean it's an overly managed figure ( if I read you right ) ? Possibly. They could work out to the silver figures run thru a "low pass filter", something econometricians do.

> the hunt brothers saga is a bit of a boone

If our currency was silver-backed I don't think speculation would be legal so it's a wee bit specious on my part to bring that up. It does however show that commodity money earns the seemingly-counterintuitive property of feeding instability. You'd think otherwise, right? Well...