> We're just at a point in the economy where it doesn't make sense to hold on to cash.
We're not at that point, and I'm speaking as someone that supports a gold standard or equivalent to prevent rampant fiat debasement. I take it you didn't live through the 1970s. There have been numerous times in the past century where currency in major economies was prominently debased far worse, far faster than what we're seeing today. Sutained QE has done far less damage to the USD as one example, than what the 1970s did to it or the extreme destruction we saw during the George W Bush years (go to Google, type in "Belgium GDP", Netherlands GDP, Czech GDP, or Brazil GDP, almost any nation; you'll see a comical liftoff in their GDP chart, far beyond any real growth rates, that's the dollar getting massacred thanks to the idiotic fiscal policies during the GWB years).
Gold went from around $250 to $1900 over a little more than a decade from ~2000-2011, before sustained QE became a thing. In the 1970s it basically went up 1,000%. Not much has actually changed about how governments destroy currencies, it's the same old same old. Perma QE didn't change much, it's not a new tool, and nothing is very different today versus the past (except that so far this is a cakewalk compared to the destruction in the past; maybe it'll get a lot worse yet, of course).
You're better off holding cash than Tesla shares at $800 or $900. I'd rather take a 3% average debasement per year than sit in the S&P 500 at these levels (especially given what the US economy is going to look like in the coming decade). From these heights I'll bide my time for the next inevitable crash or significant decline, that's when the serious returns are generated, not chasing mania ever higher in markets at late stages. The big money was already made in Bitcoin, from $0 to $50,000; the upside from here is a joke by comparison to the risk. So it goes to $150,000 (maybe). That isn't a crazy return vs the outsized risk, that's the kind of return you could have gotten in any cloud stock after IPO. Yet it takes an extraordinary move of adding ~$2 trillion in market cap for Bitcoin to get there. The risk vs reward in Bitcoin at these levels is like a lot of absurdly overvalued stocks presently. And of course everyone becomes certain that something is fundamentally different today - it's not, this mania won't endure either (to be clear, we're not just in an asset bubble, this is a mania, the 8th or 9th inning of a bubble phase).
Significant inflation isn't coming back anytime soon (not until or unless they start devaluing the USD directly, but that isn't for at least 20 years yet), the US is in a heat-death stage of economic erosion. Ever greater sums of capital are being put into the freezer in the form of very low yielding debt, that process will continue to rob the US of dynamism and growth, trending growth toward zero as it goes. This is the exact same process Japan went through, and it's why they were unable to spark traditional inflation with their crazy spending and QE-like programs, they tried everything in the Keynesian book and it all failed (for the same reason the US didn't drown in inflation from 2010-2020 despite the rather insanely low interest rates over that time). We're not going to see a serious wave of inflation this decade now for the same reason we didn't the prior decade.
We're not at that point, and I'm speaking as someone that supports a gold standard or equivalent to prevent rampant fiat debasement. I take it you didn't live through the 1970s. There have been numerous times in the past century where currency in major economies was prominently debased far worse, far faster than what we're seeing today. Sutained QE has done far less damage to the USD as one example, than what the 1970s did to it or the extreme destruction we saw during the George W Bush years (go to Google, type in "Belgium GDP", Netherlands GDP, Czech GDP, or Brazil GDP, almost any nation; you'll see a comical liftoff in their GDP chart, far beyond any real growth rates, that's the dollar getting massacred thanks to the idiotic fiscal policies during the GWB years).
Gold went from around $250 to $1900 over a little more than a decade from ~2000-2011, before sustained QE became a thing. In the 1970s it basically went up 1,000%. Not much has actually changed about how governments destroy currencies, it's the same old same old. Perma QE didn't change much, it's not a new tool, and nothing is very different today versus the past (except that so far this is a cakewalk compared to the destruction in the past; maybe it'll get a lot worse yet, of course).
You're better off holding cash than Tesla shares at $800 or $900. I'd rather take a 3% average debasement per year than sit in the S&P 500 at these levels (especially given what the US economy is going to look like in the coming decade). From these heights I'll bide my time for the next inevitable crash or significant decline, that's when the serious returns are generated, not chasing mania ever higher in markets at late stages. The big money was already made in Bitcoin, from $0 to $50,000; the upside from here is a joke by comparison to the risk. So it goes to $150,000 (maybe). That isn't a crazy return vs the outsized risk, that's the kind of return you could have gotten in any cloud stock after IPO. Yet it takes an extraordinary move of adding ~$2 trillion in market cap for Bitcoin to get there. The risk vs reward in Bitcoin at these levels is like a lot of absurdly overvalued stocks presently. And of course everyone becomes certain that something is fundamentally different today - it's not, this mania won't endure either (to be clear, we're not just in an asset bubble, this is a mania, the 8th or 9th inning of a bubble phase).
Significant inflation isn't coming back anytime soon (not until or unless they start devaluing the USD directly, but that isn't for at least 20 years yet), the US is in a heat-death stage of economic erosion. Ever greater sums of capital are being put into the freezer in the form of very low yielding debt, that process will continue to rob the US of dynamism and growth, trending growth toward zero as it goes. This is the exact same process Japan went through, and it's why they were unable to spark traditional inflation with their crazy spending and QE-like programs, they tried everything in the Keynesian book and it all failed (for the same reason the US didn't drown in inflation from 2010-2020 despite the rather insanely low interest rates over that time). We're not going to see a serious wave of inflation this decade now for the same reason we didn't the prior decade.