Make Boston Red Again

For fifty years the economic establishment has told you that deflation is a disease. Falling prices, they warn, freeze spending, crush wages, spiral the economy into a tomb. Then there's Switzerland, which has spent decades doing the forbidden thing and somehow refuses to die. The Swiss franc bought you roughly 0.23 dollars in 1970. Today it buys you about 1.20. The currency appreciated against the dollar by a factor of five while Swiss living standards rose to among the highest on earth. Consumer prices in Switzerland have repeatedly turned negative: 2015, 2016, 2020. Each time the Keynesian commentariat predicted catastrophe. Each time the Swiss kept buying watches, building tunnels through the Alps, and running a current account surplus that would envy any German. Here's what a strong currency actually does to you. Your savings grow without you lifting a finger. The chocolate bar that cost five francs holds its value or gets cheaper as Lindt's productivity improves. You are not robbed in your sleep by a central bank printing your purchasing power into the pockets of the politically connected. A Swiss worker who stuffs francs under the mattress is rewarded for thrift, the oldest bourgeois virtue, the one Washington and Frankfurt have spent a century punishing. Free market thinkers explained this generations ago. Prices fall because production rises. When a factory makes more shoes per hour, shoes get cheaper. This is not a malfunction. This is the entire point of an economy. The "deflationary spiral" the IMF dreads requires people to indefinitely postpone eating, heating, and clothing themselves in anticipation of a 0.8 percent price drop. Humans don't do this. The Swiss certainly don't. So when the European Central Bank tells you it must hit two percent inflation forever to keep you employed, understand what it is confessing. It needs your money to lose value because its entire model depends on debtors outrunning savers, on stimulus over thrift, on the quiet transfer running underneath the floorboards. The Swiss declined the offer. Their reward sits in every vault in Zurich, getting heavier while everyone else's gets lighter.

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BREAKING: Job cuts at U.S. factories ran near their highest levels since the end of the global financial crisis in 2009 and the Covid-19 pandemic, per CNBC