interest

The title of this piece is The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing.  The subtitle is Why Your Bread Is Going to Cost More.  I connect these two in reflecting on my recent podcast with David Collum, in which he stated that our money has no value and that this fact is distorting everything.

What he meant was, if you take your money to the bank to deposit it, the bank offers no interest on that money, implying that money has no value to them.  If they valued it or had a legitimate use for it, they would offer you something for its use.  Obviously, money doesn't have zero value to the banks; they can place it on deposit with the Fed for 0.25% yearly interest.  But by any historical measure, money has no value right now.

That's just what happens when any commodity – which money happens to be – becomes too abundant.  It drops in price.  What 0% rates on money tell us is that there's just an enormous amount of it sloshing around – and that, my dear friends, distorts everything else.

As I have said many times, when you misprice money itself, everything else becomes mispriced, too.