The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market is Down

Chapter 2. Saving Your Assets: Stay Out of Cash and Bonds

When Yogi Berra, asked what he thought about the economy, said, "A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore," he seemed at least to intuit that sound money should be a top national priority, a point a lot of people in pinstripes still don't seem to get.

In Chapter 1, I made the case that the dollar's vanishing purchasing power is collapsing the American economy. Here I want to focus on how inflation, which most people think begins and ends with the consumer price index under the watchful eye of the Federal Reserve, is actually created by the same Federal Reserve wearing another hat. The real inflation story should alarm you and help you understand the urgency of my advice.

A Little Background

Our government takes considerable pains to reinforce the misconception that the inflation problem is limited to rising prices well within its control, although the specter of $200-a-barrel oil is making it difficult to defend that fiction. The fact is that rising consumer prices are just a symptom of a root malignancy. The basic problem is being exacerbated daily as the Federal Reserve prints more money to accommodate an administration with a political agenda and no alternative left other than painful recession or worse.

In its terminal phase, inflation becomes hyperinflation, the scourge that collapsed the Weimar Republic in Germany in the early 1920s, Argentina's economy in the early years of the present decade, and Zimbabwe's economy today, ...