How Much Silver Do I Need For That Loaf Of Bread?

google hyperinflation

don't come over to the main forum often, but I really should!

would have to disagree with this one though:


If silver hits $75, it'd be certain that the dollar would be worth a lot less. So, more likely that you'd be not as poor with silver, but not rich with it.

I occasionally use PM price histories (sometimes over periods of 100 years or more), to relate the prices of common items to buy now, against those items a long time ago.

Ugly: The general average rate of inflation for an otherwise stable economy of a country is around the 3.5% to 4.5% per annum mark.

So, if you key in say 4% on a calculator with an exponential function over the the number of years you are looking at, you have a rough measure of what a predicted price should be.

For example, say I bought a coin for $10.00, 22 years ago.
At 4% average inflation over 22 years the price of that coin is now 2.37 x $10 = $23.70. Such a coin would have gained no real value at all, according to this calculation. It would not have lost any value, either.

With this information, you then check the calculated price against current market values. If the current market value is $48.00, you have doubled the value of your investment in real terms, over 22 years.


(In my case that is easy, I mark the purchase price and date on the 2x2 which holds the coin.)

Rough rule of thumb for any investment:
'The Rule of 72'
If you divide 72 by a %age rate, that will give you the number of years that an investment will numerically double in value.
For example,
72 divided x 4 = 18 years.
Like I said, a rough rule of thumb. It doesn't agree exactly with the calculation above. Useful with mental arithmetic, when you don't carry a calculator, perhaps at a coin show.

Yes, I also have thought of that. A few months ago, I started getting Social Security benefits. That amounted to $1630 per month. When SS started, the first person to collect it got about $35 a month. That kind of rung a bell with me and I thought about gold being $35 an oz. back in 1935 (not that citizens could get it, of course, but jewelers and goldsmiths could). Hmmm... whaddya know? Last October, gold was averaging around $1650 an oz. SS benefits are not so very different after all these years after all.

I'm happy if you average that out over 50 year periods using the last 2000 years. That's a fairly even approach and allows for the bumps of wars and invasions and economic emergencies to mostly be leveled out.

Pretty much, Europeans were still chasing goats through the mountains but other cultures have written records. Egypt, Greece, Persia, etc.. bread wasn't big in China or Korea but they probably had an equivalent. Primary commodities for humans have been specific sizes of food, salt, charcoal etc.. so there's a broad range to draw from. What you'll find I think is that people on average time spans have placed relatively the same value on their PM's over the centuries as they relate to commodity acquisitions. Of course some things are no longer commodities... salt for example and we have some new ones, like crude oil. The lowest denominator remains food and booze.

Get the texts out :)