A Great Primer on Inflation from Mises

I like this. When a stock splits ,say two share's for one , you have twice as many shares but they are only worth 1/2 of what they used to be. The supply of money, I believe has been doubled by the Fed. This is a hidden theft, the money in your pocket will eventualy be worth less than it was. But because Its all sitting in big banks and not being loaned out....yet. The inpact is not being felt...yet. This article is also avail as a mp3 download. This article shows the steps to hyperinflation, at the end he illustrates that it was a German government,German political partys that just kept pressing forward and destroyed their money and their economy. Your silver has become dross....


There Will Be (Hyper)Inflation
Mises Daily by Thorsten Polleit

...A rise in the money stock necessarily reduces the marginal utility of a money unit — and therefore its value — from the viewpoint of the individual; likewise, the marginal utility of a money unit — and therefore its value — would increase if the money stock declines.
Changes in the value individuals assign to a money unit are reflected in prices for vendible items. For instance, if the money stock in the hands of an individual rises, he may wish to increase his holdings of other goods. As he exchanges money against vendible items, the prices of the latter are bid up.

In that sense, the change in the money stock is what must be called inflation, while changes in the prices for goods and services are just symptoms of the underlying cause, which is the change in the stock of money.

What the rise in base money has done so far is prevent prices of banks' security holdings to decline to free-market levels. In other words, the money injection helps to keep asset prices at artificially elevated levels, thereby preventing prices in financial markets, credit markets in particular, from adjusting...

Alternatively, the central bank could print additional money, distributing it to households and firms as a transfer payment.[2]Under a fiat-money regime, this can be done at any time and without limit, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke made unmistakably clear in a notorious speech in 2002:

"[T]he U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation."[3]....

Government-controlled fiat money is fraudulent money. It is money that is created out of thin air, in violation of property rights: fiat-money production doesn't require any of the wealth-producing activities characteristic of the free market. It is and will always be, by construction, fraudulent money....