About Debasement Basement

Debasement Basement is a free publication about money — what it is, what keeps happening to it, and why gold and silver keep coming up in that conversation. It is written by Joel Perkes and published weekly. There is no paywall, no paid tier, and no plan to add one.

Who writes this

My name is Joel Perkes. Like most people who end up here, I came to it worried. About inflation. About what currency debasement quietly takes out of a paycheck. About a national debt past $40 trillion and climbing, and how it gets financed from here. I own some gold and silver myself.

I am a father, my background is in education, and I am not a financial adviser. I enjoy researching macroeconomics, and the educator in me enjoys sharing what is worth knowing. Whether you are new to this and curious, or have been stacking for decades, the writing and the tools here are for you.

Everything links to its source and every tool shows its arithmetic, so you can check my work. If you find a mistake, hit a glitch in a tool, or have an idea that would make this site better, email me — hello@debasementbasement.com.

How the research and writing are done

Research and drafting are done with substantial help from AI, which I then check against primary sources before anything is published. I mention it because you would reasonably want to know, and because the alternative — implying a depth of personal expertise I do not have — is exactly the thing this site exists to be an alternative to.

What that means in practice: no figure is published unless it carries a link to its source and a date. Anything I could not verify is either cut or marked as unverified. Where a comparison flatters the argument — a starting year chosen at a market peak, say — the page says so on the page, next to the number.

The sources behind the numbers, how the calculators are checked, how often the data updates and how corrections are handled are all set out on how we work.

What this site will not do

• Give you investment advice. I am not licensed to and would not want to. Everything here is descriptive — here is the mechanism, here is the arithmetic — never prescriptive. See the disclaimer.
• Predict prices. Not with dates attached, not with targets, not ever. The honest subject of this publication is how the machinery works, not where the number goes next.
• Sell you fear. There is a whole industry in this niche built on the language of imminent collapse, and it is exhausting, usually wrong, and generally attached to somebody's sales funnel. If a piece here cannot be forwarded to a skeptical colleague without embarrassment, it has failed.
• Recommend anything I would not use. If this site ever carries affiliate links, they will be disclosed next to the link itself and they will never change what a piece concludes.

What it does have

A growing set of interactive tools that answer questions people actually ask — what a 1964 quarter is worth in silver today, what a dollar from your birth year buys now, how much a million dollars physically weighs, where the gold-to-silver ratio sits against fifty-seven years of history. They are free, they work on a phone, and they show their arithmetic. Most of them exist because I wanted the answer and could not find a tool that gave it honestly.

And a weekly piece, written to be read for pleasure as much as for information. The subject is not boring. Most writing about it is.

Contact

Email is the best way to reach me, and I read everything.

• General: hello@debasementbasement.com
• Corrections: the same address, and please do — a correction is the most useful email I can get. Errors are fixed on the page with a note saying what changed and when.
• Press and media: press@debasementbasement.com
• Story tips: tips@debasementbasement.com
• Privacy requests: see the privacy policy.

Published from the United States. This page was last updated on October 11, 2026.