By Jeffrey Tucker - October 6, 2025

A website specializing in data visuals offered a helpful graphic on global inflation, 2020-2025, with no other comment about how or why this happened. The results are eye-popping and amazing, and a reminder that hardly anyone has fully come to terms with what transpired over five years.

Most currencies in the world took a 25-35 percent haircut, Far East excepted.

That’s a technical description that obscures what actually happened. The measures by which most people in the world hold the liquid part of their worldly possessions – the money they earned through hard work and saving – was robbed by a quarter and more.

Where did it go? After all, the wealth didn’t sink in the ocean. It was transferred from one group to another. It went from the poor and middle class to the elites in well-connected industries and government. It was simply sucked away from one sector to another, achieving in a matter of a few years what would have been impossible in normal times.

The forced transfer of wealth went from small business to large, from physical enterprise to digital, from store fronts to online, from citizens to government-connected contractors, from workers to leveraged capital, from families to corporations, from savers to a deeply indebted government, and so on.

You are perfectly free to believe . . .

[SNIP]