What ACTUALLY Causes Inflation?

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]I guess if you want to look at how inflation works, right? The Federal Reserve likes to use great words for this to confuse the hell out of you.

[00:00:05]Quantitative easing, which they shorten to QE. Quantitative easing is just the idea that we print more money. So, every time that we need to pay for something, we don't have the money, we just print more money. Like even we did a lot of that stuff during the pandemic where they were giving people money, it's because they were just making money out of thin air. And it's because our money isn't backed by anything. You can thank Richard Nixon for for doing that in 1970 and taking us off the off the gold standard. But, I think that's a lot more insidious cuz most people don't understand it. They just think, "Oh, things are getting more expensive." And in reality, sure costs do raise, but they don't raise in the way that you feel it. They raise because your dollar now buys less, so somebody else needs more dollars to buy something. The thing that's less insidious about how the Romans did it is their silver coin in the 1st century was 95% pure.

[00:00:43]>> Pure silver?

[00:00:44]>> Pure silver. Because the denarius, their main coin, was silver-based. They had gold coins circulating around, but the problem they had is if people somebody got a gold coin, they'd keep it because they're not going to spend it cuz it's worth something. So, there was hoarding of gold that was a real problem. So, what would happen with the silver, the guy that takes over, it's called the year of five emperors. So, the last guy to come out on top is this guy named Septimius Severus. The thing he does is he doubles legionary pay, and he gives them the largest gift ever. And each emperor after that is going to use that pattern of then doubling military pay.

[00:01:11]The way they do that then is by adding other metals to the silver to dilute it.

[00:01:15]That same coin is somewhere between two and five percent pure.