You've felt it at the grocery store. At the gas pump. When you looked up rent in your city. When you priced out a house and quietly closed the browser tab.
Everything costs more. And everyone seems to have an explanation.
Corporate greed. Supply chain disruptions. The pandemic. Russia. Shrinkflation. Lazy workers. Too many workers. Depending on who you ask, there's always a villain to point at.
Most of those explanations are either wrong or incomplete. The real answer is sitting in a chart that almost no one ever shows you.
The explanation nobody wants to give you
In 1990, there were about $3.2 trillion in US dollars circulating in the economy. By 2020, that number had grown to roughly $15 trillion. Then, in a single 18-month stretch from early 2020 to mid-2021, the Federal Reserve injected another $6 trillion into existence — a 40% increase in the money supply in less than two years.
That is an extraordinary amount of new money created extremely fast. And it went somewhere.
It went into the price of your groceries. Your rent. Your car payment. Your medical bills. Your kid's college tuition.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's basic economics: when you have more dollars chasing roughly the same amount of goods, the price of those goods — measured in dollars — goes up. Every dollar you hold becomes worth a little less. That's inflation. That's the whole mechanism.
But what about corporate greed?
The "greedflation" argument is emotionally satisfying. CEOs are overpaid, corporations are ruthless, and they obviously jacked up prices to pad their profits.
Here's the problem: grocery stores, one of the most complained-about sectors, operate on profit margins of 1–3%. That's not a typo. Walmart's grocery division operates at roughly 2%. If they were price-gouging, you'd see profit margins of 20%, 30%. You don't. The money isn't going to them.
Similarly, supply chains disrupted during the pandemic absolutely caused temporary price spikes — lumber, semiconductors, shipping containers. Those were real. But those disruptions largely resolved by 2022. The broad-based inflation across housing, food, services, and education? That didn't resolve. Because those prices aren't being driven by supply chain bottlenecks. They're being driven by the money.
What happened to the dollar since 1971
In 1971, something changed that most people never learned about in school. The US officially severed the dollar's link to gold. Before that, a dollar was a claim on a fixed amount of gold. After that, it became a claim on nothing except the government's promise — and the government could print as many as it wanted.
Since 1971, the US dollar has lost roughly 87% of its purchasing power. A dollar from 1971 buys what 13 cents bought back then. That's not a rounding error. That's the systematic erosion of your money's value, one year at a time, while the official inflation number gets reported as "2% per year" and you're told everything is fine.
The cost of a new house in 1971: roughly $25,000. Today: over $400,000. That's not because houses got 16 times better. It's because the unit of measurement — the dollar — got dramatically weaker.
Why this keeps happening
The government needs to spend money. Sometimes a lot of it, quickly. The easiest way to do that without raising taxes is to have the central bank create new money. But that new money dilutes the value of every dollar already in existence — including yours.
It's a hidden tax. One that doesn't show up on a tax form. One that hits people who save hardest — the people who did everything right.
You put money in your savings account. You're responsible. You didn't splurge. And then every year, quietly, the purchasing power of that saved money declines. The bills feel harder to pay. The life you planned for gets incrementally further away. And you blame yourself, or corporations, or bad luck — because no one taught you to look at the money supply chart.
So what can you actually do about it?
The first thing is understanding what's happening. Inflation isn't random. It isn't caused by mysterious forces. It's caused by the expansion of money, and it transfers wealth from savers to whoever got the new money first.
The second thing is recognizing that some assets hold their value better than others. Real estate has done that in the past, though it's increasingly unaffordable as a hedge. Gold has done it for centuries, though it's hard to move, store, and use.
Bitcoin was specifically designed to solve this problem. Its supply is capped at 21 million — forever. No central bank can create more. No government can dilute it with a keystroke. It runs on math and consensus, not political decision-making.
That's not a promise it will go up. It's a description of what it is: a monetary system with a fixed supply, designed for a world where the alternative is unlimited printing.
Whether you put 1% or 10% of your savings there is a personal decision. But before you decide, it helps to see the actual numbers — what your money has done versus what it could have done.
See what inflation has actually cost you — and what a different choice might have looked like.
Run the Calculator →— whyismoneybroken.com