The screeching reaction you will get is rarely worth the effort of arguing the point. Every element of modern financial policy is designed to prevent a deflationary event. Every central bank policy is designed to artificially drag the economy out of deflation using whatever fiat stimulus is necessary.

Of course, deflation is not always a bad thing. It's the harsh tasting medicine sometimes needed to correct the many problems caused by bad investments, corporate fraud, consumer debt addiction, government interference in markets, etc. We saw this during the crash of 2008, but the Federal Reserve refused to let the treatment run its course.

The US, like many countries, has become disconnected from the concept of financial consequences. But when America's massive system dodges accountability, the cost to future generations can be immense.

So now we're stuck with 17 years of persistent monetary intervention and the inevitable stagflationary crisis it created. The fact that Keynesians like Paul Krugman, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke downplayed or outright denied the existence of the inflationary threat shows, at the very least, that they know inflation is a bad thing for the general public (otherwise, why would they try to hide it?).

They denied reality so hard it made them look stupid when 2022 hit the US with a 9.1% CPI rate. The consequences of stimulus driven policies are now undeniable and the Keynesian "experts" have been proven useless, but this doesn't mean anything is going to change for the better.

My ongoing question with the return of Donald Trump to the White House has been this: How are the banks going to pull the rug out from under this administration? Will it be a deflationary crisis, or an even bigger inflationary crisis?

As I noted last month in my article "Inflection Point: US Government Shutdown And Strange Economic Signals", gold and silver prices seem to be on the verge of going parabolic (beyond the price explosion we've already seen this year), which indicates incoming inflationary pressures. Or, at the very least, a global expectation among investors and central banks of a crisis event which will precipitate further inflation.

I suspect this is partially due to the monolithic interest payments that the US government is required to make on existing debt ($250 billion every 3 months currently). Central banks and investors are snapping up gold and silver, perhaps with the expectation that US debt will become unstable, thus affecting dollar value or triggering a new round of QE.

Furthermore, despite Federal Reserve intervention in interest rates, consumer spending has not significantly slowed down and debt borrowing continues to climb to record highs. CPI growth has slowed dramatically from the Biden era, but prices have not dropped enough to give relief to average Americans. If the Fed's goal in jacking up interest rates was to slow demand, they failed miserably.

As I've noted in the past, the central bank had to hike interest rates to over 20% in the early 1980s to finally end the decade long stagflation crisis – We didn't come anywhere close to that post-pandemic. Meaning, the Fed put a band aid on an inflationary gunshot wound.