David Friedberg

And then if people went and found a whole bunch of more shells, the price per house would go up in number of shells.

But there's just more shells in the supply and effectively you've inflated everything.

And that's effectively what's gone on with the US fiscal condition.

We've talked about this many times, but I think it's always worth a rehash.

In a democracy like we have for the past 250 years, without adequate constitutional constraints, it has always been the case that over time spending goes up, government spending goes up.

And this is because in a democracy, people ask for their government to do more every year.

And as they ask for their government to do more every year, the government agents who are elected

say, okay, here you go.

And they spend more.

And eventually when the borrowing capacity gets unlocked, which is what happened in the United States, when we went off the gold standard, you borrow like crazy, you print money to fund those borrowing costs.

And you use that fundamentally to drive the next voting cycle, which is to give people more and more of what they want.

But eventually the bill comes to you.

And in the United States, the bill is coming to you.

Let's start by looking at the money supply chart.

This is the M2 money supply chart, showing the rapid rise in dollars in supply as a function of

the Central Bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, making loans to banks, ultimately to fund federal spending.

I mean, really an extraordinary number.

And if you look at the M2 money supply chart, going back to 1960, 1955, and you can see post-COVID, we were hoping that we would have resolved and sort of reduced the money supply

by some amount, but COVID really created this accelerating mechanism and we're back on track in the last couple of years to increasing the money supply.

And so over time, the US dollar gets devalued as there are simply more dollars in the market and US treasuries gets challenged.