#79 in the periodic table, #1 in our hearts

Makes it harder for people to bum change off you, too.

Every news story that contains a dollar figure is a product of its time, because inflation taints everything. That’s a recurring theme in the book version of Control Your Cash, soon to be released by a major publisher if certain contingencies break the right way.

Inflation, in one paragraph: with rare exceptions, the value of money always decreases. Slowly, but consistently. Right now a dollar is worth about 2% less than it was a year ago. That 2% is fairly consistent throughout the last century. It’d take a few more paragraphs to explain why. Better yet, a future post.

When the dollar amounts get big enough, and a federal government that lost its financial moorings a long time ago starts throwing out 12- and 13- and even 14-digit numbers, you can lose perspective. It’s hard to conceive of a million of anything, let alone a billion or a trillion. Especially when those numbers get bigger every year, thanks in part to inflation.

In the late 1940s, the U.S. dollar replaced the pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency – the default that international transactions are measured in when using another currency would be impractical or confusing. Americans today still benefit from that. Just by virtue of living here, we don’t have to worry about our currency becoming gradually worthless – and our life savings evaporating.

The dollar became the reserve currency largely due to the size of the American economy and the dollar’s relative stability. (It then self-perpetuated: the more stable the dollar, the more firmly entrenched it became as the reserve currency.) But that doesn’t mean it’ll be this way forever. Just this past week, China and several Middle Eastern countries proposed inventing a new currency to supplant the weakening dollar as the denomination in which oil and other commodities should be traded. This new currency would be nothing formal and tradable, just an amalgamation of existing world currencies that aren’t the dollar. That people are taking this seriously shows the dollar is assailable.

The U.S. dollar has enjoyed a 60-year-and-counting (however tenuously) reign as a powerful medium of exchange. As impressive as that is, gold has served as a store of value for about 100 times longer.

When the government creates too much currency, that currency weakens. Inflates. Becomes less valuable. It’s not hard for this to happen: the government just needs to fire up the presses. When a government owes a lot of money, like the United States’ does, this is an easy way of giving its creditors less than what they really deserve. But, by punishing its creditors, the government also punishes anyone else who does business in dollars. Which would be all Americans.

Gold can’t be injected into the economy as quickly as dollars can. To increase the gold output, you need to find a particularly rich vein, start extracting, put thousands of hours of manpower on the task, refine, purify, separate the dross, and bring it to market. Which is exactly what the world’s gold manufacturers try to do anyway, every day they operate. It’s not easy. That’s why gold, and not cobalt nor nickel, is the historical commodity people have used for money.

Gold isn’t an objective measure of wealth, but it’s as close as we can get in the practical world. Because extra gold is so hard to introduce to the market, gold’s value won’t fluctuate as much as something issued by the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, or the EU. That’s why financial newscasts, publications and websites prominently display the price of gold. When the price of gold goes “up” (you’ll understand the quotation marks in a minute), that’s supposed to represent something noteworthy about both gold’s scarcity and the general state of the economy.

But gold is pretty scarce no matter what. Here’s a semi-rhetorical question: why do we quote gold prices in terms of dollars, a currency continuously weakened by inflation?

Right now, gold is trading at $1049/ounce, “down” $14.90 from yesterday. The Control Your Cash book recommends again and again that in order to greater appreciate how money works, you should examine every financial transaction you engage in from the other party’s perspective. Commodity prices are no exception. Instead of quoting the price of an ounce of gold in dollars, why not say that a dollar is currently trading at 29.65 milligrams of gold (up .41 milligrams from yesterday)?

We propose our own new unit of currency: the gold milligram, symbol Aumg (prounounced “OMG”).

Here are some current exchange rates:

euro 44.18 Aumg
pound sterling 48.15
yen .33
Swiss franc 29.14
Mexican peso 2.26
renminbi 4.34

With no more than two digits before the decimal point, these numbers are easy to visualize. And because of inflation, the numbers will almost all decrease as time passes, reminding the people who use these currencies of their ever-weakening power.

Here are some more for you:

2005 U.S. dollar 73.32
1998 U.S. dollar 109.46
1968 U.S. dollar 883.49

Puts a modest 2% inflation rate into perspective, doesn’t it?

Why should we assume the dollar (or any other state-issued currency) is the objective and constant measure, and gold is the commodity with the wildly variable price? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The short answer to the first question is conditioning. Decades ago the United States switched its currency from one defined in terms of gold to one “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government”, a remnant from the reliquary of charmingly naïve and obsolete buzzphrases.

It’s natural for Americans to phrase their economic thinking in terms of “dollars”. Natural, and convenient, but damaging and incomplete. When a dollar is only as weak or as strong as the Federal Reserve arbitrarily chooses to make it, then the Federal Reserve has the ability to dictate the terms of (and to a large extent, even the size of) the nation’s economy. It’s hard to find a better example of too much power concentrated in the hands of too few. You know, the issue we fought the Brits over.

By one method, the United States money supply increased 6% from 2006 to 2007. That includes not only all the currency in circulation, but all the money held in checking accounts. If a 6% increase sounds modest, consider that the world gold output increased by 1.5% last year. Which triply overstates things, because 2/3 of the gold mined last year was used for industry, jewelry, etc. The 6% figure for the increase in greenbacks is conservative, too. It doesn’t include money in savings accounts, money market accounts, nor certificates of deposit.

In 2006 the Federal Reserve stopped calculating the increase in the broadest possible definition of money; the definition that includes huge institutional certificates of deposit held by banks. (These are CDs worth several hundred times more than the thousand-dollar ones you might be holding. But because they don’t trade among individuals, the government has an excuse for removing them from the equation.) The Fed argued that the costs to collect the data outweighed any benefits, which is why it would no longer estimate how much money is really circulating through the economy.

Yes, a branch of the 21st century American government willfully stopped crunching numbers. Can you think of any scenario in which a branch of the government would do that, if it had nothing to hide? The ironic thing is that the Fed isn’t even hiding what it’s hiding: paraphrasing, they said “Citizen, this information doesn’t concern you, and you wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. Nothing to see here.”

If the Fed released those numbers, we’d know how many trillions of dollars they’re diluting the economy with. We’d know how few Aumg it’ll take to buy a dollar next year. We’d know how badly inflation is eroding the nest eggs we’ve each spent a lifetime building.

Some estimate that the money supply is really increasing by around 16% annually. Which is more than 30 times faster than the supply of commodity gold is increasing. So which is more stable – the dollar or the Aumg?

The point of this exercise is not to argue that the next time you buy a coffee, you should offer to pay with 40 milligrams of gold. Rather, the point is to put things in perspective when, for instance, Sen. Harry Reid says health care reform will cost 59,301,000,000,000 Aumg. Or 59,301 metric tons of gold. Or 38% of all the gold ever mined.

Paper or plastic?

Would you be interested in an investment that pays 14.29%? You can get in for as little as a dollar, but the average investor puts in $6775.

You’ve had a fraction of a second to decide, but you can’t possibly still be thinking about it. 14.29%. This investment pays 7.8 times the highest available rate on money market accounts (from Flagstar Direct in Troy, Michigan), 8.4 times the highest rate on 1-year CDs (Ally Bank in Midvale, Utah) and 19 times the highest rate on checking accounts in a city chosen at random (Charles Schwab in Ocean View, Delaware.)

This investment came close to beating the Dow as a whole over the last year (which has gained 14.98%.) Unlike the Dow, this investment isn’t a gamble. It comes with a guaranteed return.

The investment is credit card debt. The numbers in the first paragraph are the average rate and balance among American cardholders.

Yeah, but he had a GREAT introductory rate.

Very funny, you soulless jerk. You’re poking fun at me while Visa and MasterCard are busy giving it to me repeatedly and hard.

Then here’s the same advice recommended to any woman who whines about being in an abusive relationship: stop being a victim.

If you have a spare dollar, there’s no excuse for having credit card debt. This post is mostly for the benefit of the people who haven’t incurred credit card debt, but if you’ve already let it get away from you, you need to wage the equivalent of total war on your debt.

Wear a sweater instead of turning the heat on. Learn to cook, and never eat out. Sell that car. You own it outright? We don’t believe you, but if you do that’s even better and will take a significant chunk out of any credit card debt you owe. Buy a bike or take the bus. Live the life of a Kosovar refugee until you eliminate that balance. A few months or even years as an ascetic beats the hell out of a lifetime as a credit card company’s sharecropper.

If you haven’t yet incurred credit card debt, the austere lifestyle above is what awaits you if you do. The only question is whether you want to compress it into as little time as possible, or spread the pain out over a lifetime.

The mantra will never get old nor obsolete: Buy assets, sell liabilities. The two aren’t purely symmetrical, however. Assets, those wonderful constructs that enrich you, are somewhat optional. Liabilities, in all their impoverishing glory, are not. You have to pay them, one way or another.

The fewer liabilities you have – e.g. a credit card balance that’s enriching the issuer while rendering you worse than broke – the less capacity you have for buying assets that will ultimately keep you out of poverty.

There appears to be no consensus on which culture the following proverb supposedly originates from – Chinese, Songhai, perhaps Aztec – but it applies here in spades:

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

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Lung cancer is an effective means for killing 1.3 million people every year. Fun symptoms include shortness of breath, abdominal pain, and fatigue. Many lucky patients also enjoy profound weight loss, and even deformed fingernails. Pain in the bones, metastasis to the kidneys and lymph nodes, skin that turns grey…lung cancer is something you’re probably going to want to shun, unless you’re a masochist of historic order.

Control Your Cash isn’t above dispensing occasional unsolicited amateur medical advice. You want to know the best way to avoid lung cancer? A way that’ll reduce your chances by at least 90%, assuming you want to avoid spending your declining years bedridden and praying for the sweet release of death?

Never start smoking.

Hopefully you’re not looking for a more intricate answer, because that’s as complex as this one gets.

You can figure out where we’re going with this. If you want to avoid being indebted to credit card companies for the rest of your life, don’t take that first drag. Don’t buy that first pack. (Or if you do, at least pay for it with cash.)

Here’s a radical concept: buy what you can afford. Credit card companies aren’t responsible for your dismal financial situation, any more than the guy behind the 7-Eleven counter will be responsible for you coughing up blood 20 years from now.

How many possible excuses can there be for incurring credit card debt? “I didn’t know how much the stuff cost”? “It just kind of crept up on me”? “It’s the retailers’ fault for making me want it so much”? Read the freaking price tag. You can’t be so easily swayed as to look at the minimum payment listed on your monthly statement and find it palatable, if you’re carrying a $6775 balance. Or even if you’re carrying a $200 balance.

We’d reprint the relevant passages of a typical credit card agreement here, but if you didn’t read your agreement when you received your card and started incurring debt, you’re not going to read it now. Just understand that the moment you fail to pay your balance in full, you’re on the road to cheating yourself, your posterity, and your planet. Incurring debt that you can’t pay is the act of a child, not an adult; a parasite, not a worker.

Credit is a privilege, a word that’s been largely equated with “right” in recent years. Not only does nobody owe you anything, nobody even owes you the means for owing other people. (Which is a good thing. One of the best ways to avoid credit troubles is to be ineligible for them in the first place.)

When credit cards were invented in the 1960s, they were status symbols. We’re not referring to the American Express black card. We mean the now-lowly green one. And for years, the issuers enjoyed a modest business charging interest to the kind of profligate people who found it gauche to pay for restaurant meals with cash. The credit card companies didn’t bother selling to middle- and low-class people, the argument being that those people didn’t have enough money to be customers.

It took a while, but the credit card companies eventually figured out that you don’t need to be rich for them to profit off you. All you needed was the capacity for earning something, somewhere down the road, and the law of large numbers would take care of the rest. Which it has, and beautifully.

In recent months, Americans who bought too much on credit engaged en masse in our national pastime – whining about their situation. Which resulted in a compliant political establishment requiring credit card companies to lower their rates. This was a classic example of Washington bipartisanship, a noun which when applied to domestic policy means “responsible people are about to get punished.”

Like almost all laws, the one capping credit card interest rates led to unintended consequences worse than the trouble that prompted the law. With their potential profit reduced, credit card companies simply stopped offering cards to high-risk customers. Many of those high-risk customers will still find their credit, even if it’s being offered by people who understand physical violence better than they do legal procedure.

But regardless, the credit card companies still have to make up the shortfall somehow. Which can mean universal user fees, penalties for prompt payment, even cancellation for people who committed the sin of paying their accounts in full every month. To the responsible credit card carrier, this means a reduced opportunity to ride free on the backs of people who refuse to Control Their Cash. But it’s also a chance to strip away preconceptions. Imagine if credit cards didn’t exist. You’d save up to pay for stuff with cash, or at least with collateral.

And how is that worse than paying a creditor every month?