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Ripple Effect

It’s All About that Monetary Base

Loading ...Addison Wiggin

August 19, 2025 • 1 minute, 36 second read


goldHousingvaluation

It’s All About that Monetary Base

Despite a frozen real estate market, home prices remain near record highs. Your local market may vary, but affordability is still out of reach for many.

Fortune noted over the weekend that homebuyers in their 70s now outnumber those in their 30s. It’s part of a demographic trend.

By this age, Baby Boomers owned 21% of the nation’s wealth. Generation X, a little less at 14%. But, Millennials, the first of whom are now turning 40, own just 4.3% of the national bounty.

That stat alone should raise eyebrows.

But the bigger issue isn’t demographics — it’s the system we’ve lived under since August 15, 1971.

Once the dollar was removed from gold, asset prices — homes, stocks, everything — have been driven higher not by productivity gains but by the steady erosion of purchasing power.

Turn Your Images On

Priced in gold, not dollars, homes roughly what they were in the 50s and 80s.  (Source: X/Twitter)

Homes priced in gold:

  • In 1950, the middle-class home cost about $8,000—or 150 ounces of gold.
  • Today, 150 ounces of gold equals roughly $510,000. That’s more than the national average home price of $421,000.

Gold continues to hold purchasing power across decades and currencies. Whether measured in houses or in stocks, the message is the same: the dollar loses ground, gold does not.

Yesterday, for the first time, we saw an independent gold survey suggesting that gold would match the trend we see in gold prices, sending prices still higher from here.

~ Addison

P.S. Still, the Fed is expected to cut rates in September. With lower rates, mortgages would trend lower and the housing market may thaw—but only because debt gets cheaper, not because the economy is stronger.

Such a move risks kicking off a “most terrifying bull market” in stocks, which sends those valuations into the stratosphere before they come crashing down to earth.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)


The Ghost of Bastiat

October 6, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

By then the receipts on my desk had arranged themselves into a sort of chorus. I heard, faintly, another refrain—one from Kentucky. In the first days of the shutdown, Senator Rand Paul stood alone among Republicans and voted against his party’s stopgap, telling interviewers that the numbers “don’t add up” and that he would not sign on to another year that piles $2 trillion onto the debt.

That, I realized, is what the tariff story shares with the broader budget theater: the habit of calling a tax something else, of shifting burdens into the fog and then celebrating the silhouette as victory. Even the vote tally made the point: he was the only Republican “no,” a lonely arithmetic lesson in a crowded room.

The Ghost of Bastiat
The Dollar’s Long Goodbye

October 6, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

Senator Rand Paul, (R. KY), who was the sole Republican to vote against a continuing resolution, seems to care about the actual finances of the government. “I would never vote for a bill that added $2 trillion in national debt,” Paul said in various interviews over the weekend.

The $2 trillion he’s referring to is the lesser of two proposals made by the national parties… and would accrue during this next fiscal year.

Oy.

We liked what Liz Wolfe at Reason wrote on Friday, so we’ll repeat it here: “One of the dirty little secrets of every shutdown is that everything remains mostly fine. Private markets could easily replace many federal functions.”

It’s a strange kind of confidence — one where Wall Street soars while Washington goes dark.

The Dollar’s Long Goodbye
A Vote For The Yen Carry Trade

October 6, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

The Liberal Democratic Party victory has sent Japanese stocks soaring, as party President Sanae Takaichi – now set to become Japan’s first female Prime Minister – is a proponent of stimulus spending, and a China hawk. The electoral win is a vote to keep the yen carry trade alive… and well.

The “yen carry trade” is a currency trading strategy. By borrowing Japanese yen at low interest rates and investing in higher-yielding assets, investors have profited from the interest rate differential. Yen carry trades have played a huge role in global liquidity for decades.

Frankly, we’re disappointed — not because of the carry trade but because the crowd got this one so wrong!

A Vote For The Yen Carry Trade
Beware: The Permanent Underclass

October 3, 2025 • Addison Wiggin

Back in the Global Financial Crisis (2008), we recall mass layoffs were driving desperation.

Today, unemployment is relatively low, if climbing.

Affordability is much more of an issue. Food, rent, healthcare, and childcare are all rising faster than wages. Households aren’t jobless; they’re stretched. Job “quits” are at crisis-level lows.

In addition to the top 10% of earners, consumer spending is still strong. Not necessarily because of prosperity, but because households are taking extra shifts, hustling gigs, working late into the night, and using credit cards. The trends hold up demand but hollow out savings.

It’s the quiet form of financial repression. In an era of fiscal dominance, savers see easy returns clipped, workers stretch hours just to stay even, and wealth slips upward into assets while daily life grows harder to afford.

Beware: The Permanent Underclass