Sound money principles, real receipts from real economies.
Money loses value quietly, a little every year. This site shows you the receipts — what inflation actually does to purchasing power, told plainly with real numbers from real economies, in every major currency.
Educational content. Not financial advice.
−50%
of purchasing power is gone in about 14 years at a steady 5% inflation rate — in any currency, in any country. Slow inflation is still erosion.
12¢
is roughly what remains of a 1971 US dollar’s purchasing power, measured by consumer prices.
79.6B%
Zimbabwe’s estimated peak monthly inflation in November 2008 — prices doubling about every 24 hours.
5,000 yrs
of monetary history is the test. Money that can be created freely has failed it every time.
Start with these
Four short videos that lay the foundation — what sound money is, and what happens to purchasing power when money is not sound.
Explore the hub
Free tools that make inflation visible, and a growing library of plain-English explainers.
The Sunday Sound-Money Note
One short email a week: one idea about money, one real chart or receipt, no hype and no predictions. Free, always.
Follow the Lab
New videos and shorts every week, on the platforms you already use.
The Library
Every topic, organized by theme. Published videos link to YouTube. Topics marked “Coming soon” are written and in production — they join the library as they publish.
8 published · 25 in production · Educational content. Not financial advice.
Foundations of Money
1971 & the Dollar System
Inflation & Everyday Prices
Coming soonFiat Food: How Inflation Degraded What We Eat
How cheap money and industrial food economics reshaped the modern diet — ideas from the book Fiat Food.
Coming soonWhy Education Keeps Getting More Expensive
Why tuition rises faster than almost everything else — and where the money goes.
Coming soonVelocity of Money: Why Printing Doesn’t Always Mean Inflation
A bigger money supply doesn’t always mean higher prices — the missing variable is velocity.
Coming soonDemographics vs Inflation
How aging populations and shrinking workforces push prices in opposite directions.
Coming soonPensions and the Inflation Tax on Retirement
What steady inflation quietly does to a fixed retirement income over 20 to 30 years.
Gold
Coming soon25,000 Tonnes: Why Indian Families Trust Gold Over Banks
Indian households hold an estimated 25,000 tonnes of gold — about three times the official reserves of the United States. How the rupee’s long slide taught a billion people to save in metal, not banknotes.
Coming soon67 Tonnes: When India Pledged Its Gold to Survive
In 1991, with foreign-exchange reserves down to roughly three weeks of imports, India secretly flew 47 tonnes of gold to the Bank of England and sold 20 more — the crisis that forced the reforms that followed.
Coming soonThe London Gold Pool and the Two-Tier Gold Market
How eight central banks tried to hold gold at $35 an ounce through the 1960s — and what replaced the pool.
Coming soonSwitzerland: The Franc’s Long Goodbye to Gold
The Swiss franc was the last major currency to cut its formal link to gold, around 1999–2000.
Coming soonGold Confiscation Beyond 1933
America’s 1933 gold order is famous. Australia and others ran gold controls of their own.
Currency Crises
Coming soonZimbabwe 2008: How Money Dies
How monthly inflation reached an estimated 79.6 billion percent, and what people used instead.
Coming soonArgentina: From Riches to Pesos
A century of currency reforms, redenominations and defaults, told in one timeline.
Coming soonBrazil’s Plano Real
How Brazil ended hyperinflation in 1994 using a transitional unit of account and a fiscal anchor.
Coming soonLebanon’s Lollars: When Bank Deposits Became IOUs
When dollar deposits in Lebanese banks could only be withdrawn in pounds, at a fraction of their value.
Coming soonAsia 1997: The Crisis That Broke the Pegs
How fixed exchange rates across Asia broke in 1997, starting with the Thai baht.
Coming soonNigeria’s Naira
Multiple exchange rates, devaluations and a move toward a managed float — the naira’s recent history.
Coming soonThe CFA Franc: The Colonial Currency 14 Nations Still Use
Fourteen African nations share a currency pegged first to the French franc, today to the euro. How it works.
Coming soon86% of India’s Cash Was Cancelled in One Night
On 8 November 2016, the ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes — about 86% of India’s currency by value — stopped being legal tender at midnight. The RBI’s own numbers on what happened next.
Coming soon29x: The Rupee’s 80-Year Slide Against the Dollar
About ₹3.30 to the dollar in 1947; about ₹95 by 2026. Every devaluation, peg and crisis in between — the full receipt on one currency’s purchasing power.
Money Without Banks
Coming soonM-Pesa: Money That Skips the Bank
Launched in Kenya in 2007, M-Pesa let millions move money by basic phone — no bank account needed.
Coming soonSingapore & Hong Kong: Hard-Money Discipline in Asia
Currency boards and conservative reserves: how two small economies kept their money disciplined.
The Global Dollar
Coming soonThe Bond Market: How Governments Borrow From the Future
Treasury yields are the price of government borrowing — and they shape almost every other price.
Coming soonThe IMF and the SDR: The World Money Nobody Uses
The Special Drawing Right was created in 1969 as a global reserve asset. Why it never became everyday money.
Theory
Coming soonThe Austrian Business Cycle: Booms, Busts, and Cheap Credit
The theory that artificially cheap credit distorts investment — and sets up the bust that follows.
Coming soonThe Cantillon Effect in Housing
The Cantillon Effect applied to property: who gets the cheap credit first, and what it does to prices.
Free Tools
Inflation is abstract until you run your own numbers through it. Three small tools, all running entirely in your browser — in the top ten world currencies, plus gold, silver and the major commodities.
Educational content. Not financial advice.
Rates snapshot — 18 October 2026. FX: Finnhub/OANDA and OFX mid-market quotes. Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper and WTI crude: spot reference prices (price-chart.com, BullionVault, nowflation.com). The figures refresh whenever the site is updated; check a live quote before acting on any single number.
1 · The Inflation Eraser
Cash under the mattress doesn’t stay still — it shrinks. Enter an amount, a number of years and an inflation rate to see what that money will actually buy in today’s purchasing power. Run it in any of the top ten currencies — or measure it in ounces of gold and silver instead.
$5,537
of purchasing power left after 20 years
−44.6%
of its buying power erased by inflation
Educational content. Not financial advice.
2 · Currency Debasement Visualizer
Three real episodes, one shape. Pick an event to see how a currency’s purchasing power decayed — measured against the US dollar or gold, using the historical figures themselves.
$35 per oz of gold
in 1971
≈ $4,000 per oz of gold
in 2025
−99.1%
of purchasing power lost
Educational content. Not financial advice.
3 · Shrinkflation Spotter
The price looks the same, the pack feels the same — but there’s less inside. Compare the old and new pack to find the true price increase per unit.
$1.00
old price per 100 g
$1.22
new price per 100 g
+22.0%
true increase per unit — whatever the sticker says
The shrinkflation checklist — what to look for
- Same box, less insideThe packaging stays identical while the weight printed in the corner quietly drops.
- The concave bottomCereal boxes, jars and tubs with a deeper dent underneath — the shape changes so the size doesn’t have to.
- “New look” relaunchesA redesign is the classic moment to resize. Compare the grams before you celebrate the new packaging.
- Count swaps for weight“12 bars” becomes “10 bars”, or each bar gets thinner — the count changes, the box doesn’t.
- Fewer sheets, smaller scoopsPaper goods shrink by sheet size and ply; detergents shrink the scoop and call it “concentrated”.
- The price-per-unit shelf tagMany supermarkets print it in small type. It never lies, even when the pack does.
Educational content. Not financial advice.
DRAFT — for owner review. This page has not been published yet; wording is open for edits before the site goes live.
About the Lab
The Hard Money Lab is a one-person education project about a simple question: what makes money hold its value — and what happens to ordinary people when it doesn’t?
The short version
I’m a chemical engineer by day — I’ve spent my career in manufacturing, where numbers either add up or the plant doesn’t run — and a sound-money student by obsession. The Lab is where I work through what I’m learning, in public, with the receipts on screen.
Every video and every tool here follows the same rules: plain explanations, real data, no hype, no predictions. Policies are described by what they were and what measurably happened — never by villains and heroes. And every currency gets its turn: examples run in every major currency, because debasement is a global story.
Why “receipts”?
Arguments about money are cheap. A grocery receipt from 2004 next to the same basket today is not an argument — it’s evidence. So is a gold price from 1971, an exchange rate from Weimar-era Germany, or a banknote from 2008 Zimbabwe. The Lab collects those receipts and reads them carefully.
What you’ll find here
- The Library — short, carefully sourced videos organized by theme: the foundations of money, 1971 and the dollar system, gold, currency crises, and what inflation does to food, education and retirement.
- The Tools — free calculators that make slow debasement visible: the Inflation Eraser, the Debasement Visualizer and the Shrinkflation Spotter.
- The Sunday Sound-Money Note — one short email a week. One idea, one receipt, no noise.
The perspective
The view is global, through a consumer lens. Not what inflation looks like in a central bank report — what it looks like at the checkout, in the rent, in the weekly shop, when the same money buys less than it did last year. That experience is the same on every continent, whatever the currency on the note. Stories like that are the curriculum.
Everything here is educational content. It is not financial advice, and it never will be.
Contact
Topic suggestions, corrections, receipts of your own worth featuring — the inbox is open. Corrections especially: if a number on this site is wrong, I want to know.
Courses
Structured, self-paced courses are planned for Phase 2 — starting with a foundations course that walks from “what is money?” to reading a currency crisis like an eyewitness.
Coming soon. The library and tools stay free.
Coming soon
Sound Money Foundations
The full foundations sequence — what money is, how it is created, what 1971 changed, and how to read inflation data without being misled by it. In production planning.
Coming soon
The Household Inflation Playbook
A practical companion: reading your own receipts, spotting shrinkflation, and understanding what steady inflation does to salaries, savings and pensions over decades.
Get the launch note
Join The Sunday Sound-Money Note and you’ll hear first when courses open — subscribers get the founding-member price.