What’s in This Week’s Issue…

Good morning. Inflation has fallen from 9% to 3.5%, yet your grocery bill is still about 30% higher than it was three years ago.

If inflation is supposedly under control, why does everything still feel so damn expensive?

The answer has less to do with inflation itself and more to do with how our economy was designed to work.

So this week…

• 🏆 The Big Play: How America Built a One-Way Economy

• 💪 The Power Move: Where you still actually have leverage

• 💵 Follow the Money: Is the US running out of weapons in the Iran War?

-GEN

🏆 The Big Play

The biggest money power story of the week.

Why Prices Move Only One Way

Inflation isn't the reason life feels expensive. It's just the scoreboard.

And once you understand what it's really tracking, you'll see why no one in power actually wants your prices to come down.

1. The Number That Runs Your Life Was Made Up on TV

Think of inflation like a speedometer and prices like an odometer. When inflation drops from 9% to 3.5%, the car slows down.

But slowing down doesn't mean going in reverse:

• In 1979, when inflation hit 15%, Fed Chair Paul Volcker raised interest rates to nearly 20% to kill it.

• The result: two back-to-back recessions, 10.8% unemployment, and farmers driving tractors to blockade the Federal Reserve.

• Inflation collapsed, but prices didn't. Every inflated cost from the 1970s stayed exactly where it was.

It taught policymakers a painful lesson that bringing prices down usually means destroying millions of jobs. So they stopped trying to reverse prices and focused on slowing how fast prices rise.

That thinking eventually became the 2% inflation target. In 1988, New Zealand's finance minister casually suggested an inflation target during a TV interview. His central bank later formalized it, and over time, most major central banks, including the Federal Reserve, adopted the same idea.

Today, your mortgage, savings, investments, and even your next raise are influenced by a number that began as an off-the-cuff remark on television.

2. The Perfect Crime Hiding in Plain Sight

Once everyone expects prices to keep rising, charging more becomes a much easier decision:

• Wingstop raised prices during the chicken shortage but never fully lowered them after chicken costs fell.

• Coca-Cola increased prices 13% while selling more drinks than the year before, admitting much of the increase came from pricing power, not higher costs.

• Four companies now control roughly two-thirds of America's grocery market, giving consumers fewer places to shop when prices rise.

Economists call it excuseflation. The hard part is knowing where the crisis ends, and the pricing decision begins.

The same pattern exists across industries.

For example, three companies produce almost all the world's RAM. When prices jumped 110% in one quarter this year as AI demand exploded, a federal lawsuit alleges those same firms coordinated production cuts to tighten supply.

Public companies are judged against last quarter's earnings. Even if a CEO wanted to lower prices after costs fell, reporting lower revenue is career suicide.

The rest depended on us.

3. What You're Really Paying With

The biggest reason prices stayed high wasn't that Americans suddenly became wealthier.

It was because they found new ways to keep paying:

• Credit card debt reached a record $1.28 trillion, with delinquencies climbing to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.

• Nearly 29% of Buy Now, Pay Later users now finance groceries, up from 14% just two years ago.

• More than half say they couldn't make ends meet without these services.

Stores still get paid in full. To them, the higher prices worked.

Dynamic pricing has existed online for years, and Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels that allow prices to change almost instantly. The company says prices will remain the same for everyone. For now.

But there is one force that still works.

When PepsiCo pushed Doritos above $7 a bag, customers pushed back. The company lost roughly $50 billion in market value, and executives suddenly started talking about affordability.

That means your refusal to buy works. But only for things you can actually walk away from.

That leaves one obvious question: where do you still have a choice?

💪 The Power Moves

Playbook for understanding the game of power.

Where You Still Actually Have Leverage

Most of your financial life isn't something you can negotiate.

Add up your rent, insurance, utilities, transportation, and debt payments. For the average household, that's about 84 cents of every dollar spent. You only get a real say over the remaining 16 cents.

That's your leverage.

When people financed groceries, stores learned they could keep pushing prices higher. When PepsiCo pushed Doritos past $7 a bag, customers pushed back. Snack sales turned negative for the first time in over a decade, forcing executives to start talking about "affordability."

That’s where your leverage begins:

• Shrink the 84 cents. Every fixed cost you eliminate gives you more freedom.

• Pay down high-interest debt. Interest is one of the few prices guaranteed to compound against you.

• Spend intentionally. Every unnecessary purchase tells companies what you're willing to tolerate.

• Reward businesses that compete on value, not pricing power.

You can't control inflation, the Federal Reserve, or corporate pricing.

But you can become less dependent on all three.

The Takeaway:

The system isn't broken.

It's working exactly as designed.

Prices rarely come back down because no one wants the recession it would take to make that happen. Once you understand that, you stop waiting for life to get cheaper and start building a life that's harder to squeeze.

💵 Following the Money

Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.

#1 - Iran war has depleted nearly all of some key US missile stockpiles: Reports

#2 - Why the US is ramping up intelligence activity in Cuba

#3 - How wildfires highlight insurance crisis for homeowners across US

✨ Poll time!

📰 Keep Reading…