Independent Macro Research
Austrian economics, monetary policy, and the case for holding things that can't be created by keystroke.
Every shelf up there is stocked with something the money supply did first.
01US National Debt
It only goes up, like the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe where your parents measured you every birthday. Except this kid never stops growing.
+$75,995 / sec · +$6.57B / day
Enough for 0 Silver Eagles at spot. The US government bought none, like a teenager who spends the whole paycheck by Friday and can’t name one thing they bought.
Extrapolated from Treasury Debt to the Penny, Oct 1, 2026. Smoothed trend, not the daily series.
02Debt per active taxpayer
Your share, split evenly, like a group dinner where you ordered tap water and the table ordered lobster, three bottles of wine and dessert “for everyone.”
÷ 145,000,000 filers, a fixed round baseline rather than an official count. The small digits are hundredths of a cent. Reading faster will not help. Your household’s share, per person and in gold →
03The Money Printer
Off switch broken. Press “TURN OFF” anyway. The repairman hasn’t seen one switched off since 1971, and when we called the Fed for parts, they laughed so hard they printed a box of tissues.
Washington’s farewell advice: don’t pile up debt. The US now owes over $40 trillion. He’s rolling over in his grave so fast the cemetery wants to hook him up to the power grid.
Per ounce. Chart: yearly averages, each metal on its own scale.
A pre-1965 dime holds about $3.86 of silver — some forty-seven times its face value. Count the jar, or just enter a face value, and see the lot.
Try itAn hour of 1964 minimum wage was five silver quarters. That silver is worth $49 today. The CPI says $13.
Try itYour true cost per ounce once shipping is counted, the premium in dollars and percent, and the price that gets you back to level. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Try itOne ounce of gold buys 74 of silver today. That is above the 57-year average and below the last ten. Chart it, then measure your own stack against it.
Try itNew Is my coin fake? Weigh it, measure it, check it against the mint →
New Is my coin silver? Pick the coin, type the year →
New My Stack: track your gold and silver privately →
22 lb in hundreds, 17.2 lb in gold, 1,269 lb in silver. Drawn to scale, next to a person.
Try itBorn in 1985? Your dollar still buys 32¢ of a dollar. Measured in gold, 8¢. Pick your year.
Try itA $75,000 salary weighs 19 oz of gold. The same standard of living in 1971 weighed 222 oz.
Try itNew US coin melt value chart: what the metal in every coin is worth →
New Troy ounce converter: grams, kilos, pounds and tola, with the value at spot →
New Gold and silver price by year: every year since 1913, then and in today’s dollars →
New Lost your gold in a boating accident? Get the certificate →
New Scrap gold calculator: what your 14K, 18K and sterling is worth →
New What is your share of the national debt? →
01 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 19, 2026 · 5 min read
An island in the Pacific treated a stone nobody had seen in generations as spendable wealth, and a German official with a pot of black paint proved they were right about how money works. Before you decide this is quaint: the story ends in a Manhattan vault with men in suits doing exactly the same thing.
02 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 20, 2026 · 4 min read
A $13.50 burrito costs 0.096 grams of gold — a cube 1.7mm across, which you would need tweezers to hand over and a sneeze to overpay with. The objection is completely correct. Gold is not a debit card; it is a fire extinguisher, and nobody complains that those make poor cooking implements.
03 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 21, 2026 · 5 min read
You already understand Roman debasement, because you have held a chocolate bar that costs what it always cost and weighs rather less. Rome invented shrinkflation and applied it to the money itself. Then Diocletian made raising prices a capital offense, which is like setting your kitchen on fire and prosecuting the smoke alarm.
04 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 22, 2026 · 5 min read
In 1965 a Congressman stood up and explained precisely what removing silver from the coinage would do. The Act passed anyway and it happened on schedule. Millions of people who had never heard of Gresham felt two coins, kept the heavier one, and were proved right by about forty-eight times.
05 · Stories
Joel Perkes · Sep 23, 2026 · 5 min read
The federal income tax was temporary too. On a Sunday evening in August 1971, sixteen people came down from a mountain in Maryland having decided to suspend the dollar’s link to gold, temporarily, and the word “temporarily” has now outlasted the eight-track tape, the Walkman and the station wagon with fake wood paneling on the sides.
06 · Explainers
Joel Perkes · Sep 24, 2026 · 5 min read
Not gold, and not nothing. A dollar is the Federal Reserve’s IOU, backed by Treasury debt that is itself backed by dollars — two instruments propping each other up like a pair of drunks. What actually holds it upright is that the IRS accepts nothing else.
Nothing filed under that category yet.