The Time Value Of Money

Odd nit-pick: When prices of things rise faster than they should, we call that inflation.

I have no idea what "faster than they should" means in this case, and it frankly doesn't matter - it's inflation if prices rise at all (and deflation if they fall).

> Which leads me to my final point. Markets set rates. Banks don't and governments don't. Banks and governments certainly impact rates and governments can do a lot to impact rates and they do all the time. But at the end of the day it is you and me and it is the traders, both speculators and hedgers, who determine how much of a discount we'll accept to get our money now and how much interest we'll want to wait another year.

Technically that's a true statement, but in practice governments can set interest rates as artificially low as they want.

How they do this: Government officials can lend money to banks at less than the rate of inflation. That makes it in a everyone's interest to borrow as much as they can and buy any hard asset remotely likely to appreciate or even hold its value with it.

The inflation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy at that point. More money comes into existence by being lent, it's immediately put into chasing hard assets, which increases the price of assets. Which then makes it make sense to borrow money and buy hard assets with it, because next year the asset will be worth more than the loan because of the inflation.

Long story short - technically sorta true, but governments can reduce interest rates dramatically at the expense of inflation, which then becomes cyclical. More inflation means more demand for lower interest rate money, which means more inflation. The author's point is correct in theory, though in practice governments can set interest rates basically as artificially low as they want. (Getting them artificially high doesn't seem possible in the current generally practiced monetary/banking/legal/tax systems)

So - correct in theory point, but in practice governments who control fiat currencies can set interest rates as low as they want (albeit it with some nasty side effects).