I went looking for articles on what Obama did to the US money supply, the M2 number. Holy smoke, there was article after article about how Obama rescued the economy from certain death. What bunk. Here’s my memory. Obama doubled the M2 number, the amount of US money in existence. That turned every dollar into fifty cents. Then, because that did nothing to the economy, he did it again. So, from fifty cents to twenty-five cents. Then, he added 87 billion dollars per month. What proportion that was to the overall total I don’t know. We didn’t feel the impact right away because inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. That money didn’t get down to the level of us and the grocery store right away for a number of reasons. The banks who got the cash, did not lend it out or otherwise put it into circulation. What did they do? They bought stock.
The other day I had to buy a bottle of alcohol. It used to be .79. I paid $3.98. Look around at the things you buy. Prices have gone way up. The thing that has saved us from Weimar levels of inflation has been Covid and the collapse of the Chinese economy.
The economy is complicated. Despite what wags tell us, it’s nothing like the household economy. That’s because the households can’t print money. Also, the prices we see are affected by the world at large and, in general, that has softened things. For example, because the US market was going up and the EU gave Cypress a haircut on their bank accounts, everyone who had money to invest dumped it in the US market, which makes things cheaper for us. Thirteen cents on the dollar is a guess. But things Obama did will haunt the US consumer for the rest of our lives.