The Pomp Podcast - Economist Explains Why Gold Is Beating Bitcoin | Bob Murphy

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Bob Murphy is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and Chief Economist at Infineon. In this conversation, we discuss Federal Reserve policy, tariffs, and what’s really happening in the U.S. economy. We break down the housing market, inflation, and what it all means for your wallet—plus Bob’s Austrian economics perspective on gold, bitcoin, and the road ahead.=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.=======================As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true — opportunity is everywhere. At Arch Public, we help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, our dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors… but where we really shine? Our arbitrage algos — designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of Arch Public’s products is they are free! Yes, you heard that right, try Arch Public for free! Take advantage of wild moves in assets like $SOL, $SUI, and $DOGE, and use them to stack more Bitcoin — completely hands-free. Arch Public is already a preferred partner with Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood, and our team is here to help you build smarter in any market. Visit Arch Public today, at https://www.archpublic.com, your portfolio will thank you.=======================0:00 – Intro1:52 – Why gold has outperformed bitcoin5:06 – Fed vs White House: power, politics, & “independence”17:03 – Tariffs, trade deficits, & inflation outlook22:06 – Stablecoins: why they matter & key risks28:34 – Economic data: what to trust?

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano many of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them

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If you're picturing a Mad Max scenario, I can't imagine a world where someone's sitting on gold coins that that's not going to be valuable, whereas you're not as sure if you have a bunch of tokens on the blockchain somewhere in a crazy world where people are spitting each other over bottled water. Is that going to be bad? So I personally am bullish on both, but I can see how. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very special treat.

I've got Dr. Bob Murphy is going to join us. He's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and he's the chief economist at Infineo. In this conversation, we're going to talk about the Federal Reserve, economic policies like tariffs, what's going on in the U.S. economy, the housing market, in your wallet, and in your investment portfolio. Bob is somebody who is an Austrian economist. He has a very different way of viewing the world than most other economists you're going to hear. And frankly, he's got a kind of straightforward approach. He just calls it how he sees it. And I think a lot of you are going to agree with his views on gold, Bitcoin, and what's going on in the U.S. economy.

Here's my conversation with Dr. Murphy. Dr. Murphy, I thought a great place to start the conversation is Bitcoin and gold. Those two assets used to be kind of simpatico. You know, Bitcoin would go up, gold would go up, and the Bitcoiners and the gold bugs would sharpshoot each other. But really, they were brothers in arms of the sound money principles. Gold bugs are celebrating. They have done very well over the last year, while Bitcoin is not. Why do you think that's happened?

Well, sure. So here, yeah, and I agree. And yes, there was a sort of like friendly rivalry among them that they could all agree on. They didn't like, you know, fiat government money, but they had pros and cons. And, of course, you know, different views on guys like Peter Schiff and such. So, yeah, I think my read of the situation is because even going back, like when things happened in Cyprus and whatever, that it seemed to me that if people if the news were just that, oh, the Fed's going to do more QE or whatever and thought, OK, the economy isn't like in an imminent crisis mode. It's just we think there's more dollars that are going to be dumped in the system than, yes, both gold and Bitcoin would seem to go up.

But it seems like if there was actual uncertainty about what's going to happen next month, then I think you would see people rushing to the precious metals more as like a safety sort of panic mode and actually maybe selling off some of their crypto holdings to raise the liquidity to be able to go do that. And I think just intuitively, it kind of makes sense that if you're picturing a Mad Max scenario, I can't imagine a world where someone's sitting on gold coins that that's not going to be valuable, whereas you're not as sure if you have a bunch of tokens on the blockchain somewhere in a crazy world where people are shooting each other over bottled water, is that going to be valuable? So I personally am bullish on both, but I can see how when things really, you know, push comes to shove that some people think gold and silver are, you know, more time tested, whereas Bitcoin has a lot of convenience and certain promise for the future. But maybe it's not the thing you want to run to as a refuge. Do you think that there's like a Mad Max scenario fear right now? And that's why gold's done so well and Bitcoin hasn't? Or do you think it's more kind of central banks or like what do you think is describing why gold has outperformed the last 12 months? Well, I think all of the above that I really do think that we're starting to see, you know, the unraveling of the U.S. as being the global superpower and that, you know, there's just various metrics that I think China is rivaling it.

You know, they've added three times as much to their naval capacity over the last five years, say, than the U.S. has by purchasing power parity metrics. The Chinese economy has long surpassed the U.S. in terms of total output. But they've been adding to their gold stockpile. If you look at the official gold reserves, China and also Russia, like since 2000, have vastly increased, whereas the U.S.'s official number has stayed the same, as I'm sure your listeners are familiar with. There's lots of speculation that maybe the U.S.'s numbers aren't even legitimate. So, yeah, I think on many metrics, more people are realizing that 20 years from now, it's going to be a multipolar world. The U.S. is not going to run the show. And so, yeah, I think people are realizing the days of dollar hegemony are over.

And so just on that fact alone, right, central banks are diversifying, you know, not as a strategic element necessarily, but just as a matter of financial prudence. So one of the things I find interesting is central banks in other countries, we kind of deem them as like the smart money, right? And, OK, they're going to sell dollars and they're going to go buy gold or they're thinking about geopolitical, maybe, you know, multi polarity, kind of all these things that are cool to talk about. But then here at home, we've got the White House who's basically calling Powell an idiot every day and Powell basically, you know, yelling and screaming back, saying that the White House is not the smartest, you know, tools in the shed. And so how do you look at the tension between the executive branch and the Federal Reserve? And, you know, should we just extrapolate maybe the chaos between those two groups here in the U.S. and say, hey, this is how it is in all these other countries as well? And maybe the central bank isn't as all knowing. Well, yes. And that's a good tension.

you pointed i've also seen that play out where you know as an austrian school economist of course i i don't like communism i think central planning doesn't work but like oh who's the big rival right now i'm worried about the chinese communist party like those guys are so smart and why you know i mean so there is that sort of thing in the rhetoric that there are some um some funny elements of it but but you're right to your question specifically uh i one way of attention between like what the fed is doing in the white house um and so that was resolved you know when Powell came out announcing that, hey, he was being probed and so forth, was there was an element of the late October Fed meeting when, you know, when they released their minutes and talked about

policy, where they said they were going to continue to let mortgage-backed securities roll off the balance sheet. But beginning in December, they were going to start reinvesting that and let, you know, have the Treasury balances start accumulating. All right. So clearly they were signaling, yeah, even though we're sort of adjusting our stance, we're no longer overall shrinking the balance sheet, they were still signaling, but we are still unwinding the mortgage-backed securities, like that element of our footprint we're getting out of. And so that, you know, of course would put pressure, you know, push up mortgage rates and, you know, put pressure on the home sector. And I had been telling, you know, our clients and things that, hey,

I'm concerned about housing, you know, in 2026 for this reason. And so then when Trump recently announced that he was ordering, I think it was on a Truth Social post that he wanted, it turned of people thought he meant fannie and freddie to buy 200 billion of mortgage-backed securities at that point when he first made that announcement i didn't know oh were they coordinating behind the scenes or are they just actively trying to thwart the fed and then like it was the next week that powell came out announcing he was about the criminal investigation so to me yes it clearly looks like they are at odds on that issue just more generally um if you if you looked at the fed as just like a foreign country it's holding more treasury securities right now

$4 trillion and change than like the next five or six countries put together. Like China only has like $686 billion or something like that. So in terms of just the power the Fed has and the ability to sort of stick it to the federal government and what they want to do, like they announced a $1.5 trillion military budget for next year, right? They clearly need to have deficit financing. They need the Fed to be on board. If the Fed all of a sudden decides not to accommodate that, that could be very expensive. Just one last consideration. If right now the outstanding debt is like $38 trillion. So just having the treasury yield curve shift up by one percentage point across the maturities, that's an extra $380 billion in annual interest expense, right?

So that right there, I mean, that's more than a lot of countries, their total budget. So I'm just saying that, yes, I think the White House, given its plans and what they wanted to do, all things considered, needed the Fed to be on board. And this is their way of making sure that happens. Now, what's interesting to me is the Fed is deemed independent, but yet they still are overseen by Congress. And, you know, you said as a Austrian economist, very different views than maybe the Keynesian economists would have. And so how do you look at the role of the Fed and its independence? And, you know, if you could kind of draw it from scratch, what exactly would they be doing in an economy like the United States? right and so yes with all this stuff it's it's theater that um so i i understand why people are concerned about the sort of uh you know heavy-handed moves of the trump administration like looking into lisa cook and things like that and that yes it it's it's uh violating the normal decorum at

the very least but the idea that the federal reserve is this independent thing and you just got a bunch of bean counters who are drawn supplying demand curves and taking you know first derivatives on the chalkboard and that's what's saying that that's crazy all right just to give one example um i remember a lot of my academic colleagues were so shocked when you know the financial crisis hit and then the federal reserve uh in the fall of 2008 started announcing they were paying interest on reserves and so i knew a lot of my colleagues were stunned because oh no the fed should be providing liquidity right now why would they be paying banks to not make loans to people that and oh the mystery is solved though when you realize the fed is owned by

the banks and it was just, you know, giving them money like that was an extra flow of income. Like then all of a sudden the mystery is solved. Right. So so I think that, yes, the Fed has always been political. In fact, the ostensible independence that was only formally established after World War Two with the Treasury Fed Plaza Accords. Right. So it was like just a matter of course, it was like written into what it was supposed to be doing, that the Fed's function was to help the Treasury finance the world wars, for example. So this idea of independence is a relatively recent claim. And I think it's largely just, again, to make everything look like it's above board when in fact it's not. Another example, when the Fed was

doing all those rounds of QE was also during the Obama years when they had four years in a row of trillion dollar plus deficits. So I don't think that was a coincidence that the Fed decided, hey we want to load up on treasury debt right when the federal government was issuing so much of it so again this idea that they're independent you know it walmart is an independent company but it's not that their ceo has to get approved by congress right so that doesn't really really work um so so there is that element but again in practice if the people who are running the fed you know on a day-to-day basis if they decide to go rogue and and deviate from the script they have a lot of power. And so I do think you see these squabbles. And as with a lot of things, I think the issue

with Donald Trump is he talks very frankly. He doesn't pepper his words and use nice euphemisms. He just kind of says the situation. So it's not that much of a departure from how things have always been. It's just Trump is more frank about it. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in that retirement account? Then listen up. This message is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement. They're helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 80 cryptocurrencies with world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a vertically integrated licensed trust company. It's no wonder more than 200,000

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Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. That's Bitcoin IRA dot com slash pump to upgrade your retirement today. Now, one of the things that Trump seems to have done along with Besson in particular is it feels like the Trump administration is essentially trying to wrestle control of the economy and the market away from the Fed. You know, the Fed, if you go back all the way to the mid 90s, they pretty much set the market. You know, when they lowered interest rates, the market responded. When they raised interest rates, the market responded. And, you know, sometimes we got a little out of whack. But for the most part, the Fed was in control. The whole saying of, you know, don't fight the Fed was a saying for a reason. It's been this

great adage. But now we have deregulation. We've got tax cuts. We've got supply side economics. We've got tariffs. We've got, you know, all of these components of reshoring and job creation and all this stuff, it really does feel like the market is forcing the Fed's hand now. And a lot of the market dynamics or kind of evolutions are coming from economic policy or, you know, AI and tech innovation and things like that. So how do you see this balance between, like, who is controlling the market and is the Fed now working for, you know, the executive branch via the market dynamic? Well, sure.

So great question. And I would say for your viewers who haven't seen it, Besson, he, this was, I'm trying remember the exact it was definitely last year at some point but he had this document that he that put out where he was like challenging or he was saying we need to restore the independence of the fed and in the sense that they need to return to their you know their original calling and that they have too much discretion right now in the sense of they're being able to deviate from these things and he and he it was it was a rare a very well-written document and you know they they made a lot of plausible points so i mean cynics just dismissed it and said oh he's just doing that

because, you know, the Trump administration wants to tighten the screw. But regardless of the motivation, what they produced was a very coherent, reasonable critique of Fed policy. But just pointing out things that, you know, the Fed dabbling with mortgage-backed securities and all that kind of stuff, like that was, you know, inaugurated after the financial crisis. As of the year 2004, the idea that, oh, if housing is in trouble, maybe the Fed will come in and just start buying a trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities. Like that would have been unthinkable. People said, no, you can't do that.

that you can imagine the corruption that that would lead to. Right. So there's lots of elements like that. Just another example of how the Fed really was doing all sorts of stuff in secret with no oversight. You may remember that, you know, they in the fall of 2008, they engaged in all these extraordinary operations and measures. You know, they had new lending term lending facilities and things like this. And there was a congressional hearing and they called Bernanke before them. This was in December of 2008. And he was outlining, you know, just all the new measures they were taking and things like that, because people were very concerned about inflation and stuff like that. And all the billions of dollars in loans that had been provided to

financial institutions. And they asked him, they said, Chairman Bernanke, can you give us a list of the recipients of these funds? And he said, well, no, I can't do that because that would defeat the purpose of the program if the public knew which companies. So, I mean, if you just stop and think about that, it's not just that the Fed was creating literally billions of dollars just with keystrokes, but they weren't even telling Congress who was getting the money. So that's an extraordinary amount of power that's vested in this institution that, oh, that's just this boring thing that regulates monetary policy to trade off inflation, unemployment, when that's a very powerful engine. And so, yes, I think Besant is taking the lead on trying to sort of rein them in and say, hey, this is ultimately the Fed is a creation of the federal government. And if it just starts going rogue and doing things that are not in line with what the people wanted and what, you know, the president is there to do, the elected representative thinks is appropriate.

You know, we have all these various measures to reassert our our coordination on that. So I think that's the tack they're taking. And then, yes, your broader question. I think the U.S., as it's getting less of a footprint in the global market, that the Fed is not as powerful as it used to be. I mean, nobody worries about the central bank of some small country somewhere influencing global affairs. And I think over time that, yes, the Fed, even though it remains powerful compared to any other private company, but in the grand scheme that, yes, its influence is waning. Let's talk about tariffs and the trade deficits and kind of the impact on inflation. If you go back to April, everyone promised us high inflation, empty shelves, next Great Depression is right around the corner. they said the tariffs were going to be highly inflationary and pretty much the exact opposite

seems to have happened. What's your take on the tariffs, its impact on inflation and on the trade deficit? Sure. Great question. So I've been trying to be fair and balanced on this stuff because a lot of my libertarian free market colleagues are reflexive free traders. And so am I that I like free trade. I don't like tariffs. I don't like any taxes. But the points I was making modestly was to say, if you could get a package and Trump's, you know, chief economic advisor, this was what he was recommending. If you can have a whole package deal where you drastically cut federal spending, get massive income tax cuts, and then offset that partially with tariff hikes and you had deregulation, if you coupled all those together, that would make

a lot of economic sense. So it's true. If you hold everything else constant and just raise tariffs, then yeah, that's just an extra tax and that interferes with global commerce or whatever. And that per se is not quote good for the economy. But if it is done in conjunction with all these other pro-growth measures, it could make sense. I mean, just for one reason,

in general, economists think that sales taxes are more economically efficient than income taxes, right? That if you're taxing consumption, that doesn't distort things as much as if you tax income. Okay, so just on that narrow point, if you shift away from taxing income and shift to just, you know, taxing goods as they come in, that is a point in its favor.

And also there's a privacy element that, you know, an income tax besides being economically destructive means everybody has to send records to the IRS about all their dealings. And so if you could get to a system where you didn't use income taxes, that would be wonderful. So I think that's partly why historically

when the U.S. was just funded mainly through, you know, customs duties and such, we had such great growth. But the problem is you can't raise that much revenue from just taxing imports. And so given how much the government spends, tariffs alone wouldn't do it. So I think there is that element involved. And then, yeah, the point, the last thing I'll say here in response to your question, I think a lot of the critics who were saying, oh, no, it's not foreigners who pay tariffs, it's always the consumer, that was always overblown. Like just in general, in economic, you know, in a standard introductory class, if you teach the government levies a tax on cigarettes, who pays it, the smoker or the tobacco companies? It has to do with the elasticity. There's not just an answer. It depends.

And so likewise, the U.S. is a huge market for foreign goods. And so because of that, there's you got to look at the elasticity. So in general, a tariff gets the burden is borne both by the foreigners and the domestic consumers. And it depends on the case by case basis. Yeah, you know, it's so funny is most of the things I think people are taught in economics 101 class end up actually not being how the real world works. And once you kind of see that, then you start to say, OK, maybe I have to go back to kind of first principles thinking. And I don't know about you, but most of the schools that me or my friends went to, there was no Austrian teaching whatsoever. Right. It was very much kind of, hey, here's the indoctrination into the system.

And so when something like tariffs happen, I mean, it was blasphemy. you could not dissent if you said that hey maybe this might work you basically were kicked out of the club right back in uh in april and i think a lot of people are regretting that yeah well yeah and it's and i've even a few other people um that were like in the trump orbit who were saying things like supply side guys and that was the point they were making they're saying yeah yeah of course other things equal tariffs or taxes and you know we're against taxes but all these like you had lots of like progressive democrats all of a sudden becoming avid free traders you You know, like Nancy Pelosi all of a sudden, you know, sleeps with Bastiat by her bedside.

And it's like, come on, this is obviously political. And the issue is that, you know, 90 percent of what people were saying about why tariffs were bad would also be true of income taxes. Right. So that was more the issue, which is like be consistent about it. Yeah. Again, I'm not pro tariff in that sense. But the idea that tariffs like that, the people pushing tariffs are, you know, particularly economically ignorant, whereas all the other taxes make perfect sense. that's crazy. Today's episode is brought to you by ArchPublic. As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true. Opportunity is everywhere. At ArchPublic, they help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, their dynamic accumulation algorithms are

built for long-term investors, but where they really shine? They're arbitrage algos designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of ArchPublic's products is they're free yeah you heard that right try arch public for free take advantage of wild moves and assets like solana suey and doge and use them to stack more bitcoin completely hands-free arch public is already a preferred partner with coinbase kraken gemini and robinhood and their team is here to help you build smarter in any market visit arch public today at archpublic.com and your portfolio will thank you let's talk about stable coins those seem to be you know coming out of the kind of crypto market, if you will. Bitcoin obviously has product market fit. Exchanges have product

market fit. And then stable coins seem to be kind of that third product. These stable coins are pretty interesting because on one hand, they are extending dollar dominance globally. Obviously, Tether owns, you know, nearly 200 billion dollars of treasuries. They're much bigger than most countries. At the same time, you know, it seems like the banks, they've got, you know, very upset over this whole idea of like paying interest and how this is done and the regulations. And they kind of see it as a threat and so how do you as an economist look at the role of stable coins and maybe the pros and cons of them uh moving forward well sure so what's interesting just on stable coins we sort of take it for granted and what a big market they have like you say with tether and

others but like prima facie it is kind of interesting because originally when you know bitcoin first came on the scene and then other you know crypto currencies were being created and issued, the idea that you would want to get onto the blockchain in order to tie your token to the US dollar or to the euro would be crazy. You'd say, no, that's the whole point. We want to get away from that stuff. So it is kind of funny that one of the leading use cases right now in blockchain-based finance is to have things that are pegged to the US dollar, right? So I just do it. Now, I realize why in practice that happened, but I'm just saying it is interesting how things evolve and people realize new technologies have perhaps uses that the original creators wouldn't

have thought of. So for me, what I've been focusing on in my research, and I was saying this early on in recent commentary, it has confirmed my suspicion that stable coins, if the regulators didn't get involved and just let things go, then I think naturally the market would have evolved such that stable coin issuers would have begun paying interest to their customers, right? So in other words, people wire in U.S. dollar funds, they get these tokens that maintain parity with the dollar. And so then the issuers, what do they do? Especially if they're not holding 100% reserves, if they just go invest it in assets, they get to pocket that. And so how would you as a new stable coin issuer gain market share? You say, oh, if I'm earning whatever, 8% on our

portfolio, then we'll share 4% with our customers, right? And that's how we'll get. So the idea, like if you have 100 of their stable coins, it turns into 104 next year, right? Because they each maintain parity. And so that was clearly how the way the market was going, you know, as it evolved. And so then the Genius Act explicitly forbid that. And I think the reason, you know, I don't know this, but I'm pretty sure behind the scenes, it was the banks who made sure that that was a key component of that legislation because left to its own devices, if you had stable coins that could pay interest, that would put conventional banks out of business, right? Because again, why would you keep your money parked with a regular bank that's closed on

weekends and whatever, when you could have blockchain-based finance that's available 24-7 and pays a higher return, you know, why wouldn't you do that? So everybody would shift over to stablecoins. So I think that was the main reason the Genius Act explicitly forbid paying of interest directly to stablecoin holders. But then, you know, now what's going on, and you see Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America recently, you know, was warning about this, saying, if Congress doesn't close these loopholes, you're going to see $6 trillion leave the conventional banking sector and so there what they're referring to is even though the genius act explicitly forbid it there's still workarounds right like you could still you know like coinbase

or whoever could say oh if you park your stable coins with us we'll give you all of these incentives and rewards so even though the issuer of the stable coin or circle whoever isn't directly paying it to you still you know by going that route you're getting it so that's now what is in flux and they're arguing about and they're trying to reach a compromise where, well, maybe if you stake it so you don't have access to your money, then you can get paid. But if you have instant access, so that's kind of the way it's evolving. And all this stuff is very interesting because this really is like an example of what's called free banking, right? Like the idea of just pure banking in the sense of just financial intermediaries and people giving their money

to one group, getting a token that's a claim on that, and then people accepting it. And should to be back to 100 percent or not. These are all issues that, you know, were sort of like libertarian science fiction. And now it's, you know, it's reality. What are the things that you think could actually still be issues with the stable coins? Right. Is it just the banks don't like it or they're like systemic issues that we should be aware of? So my colleague at the Mises into Alex Pollack, he's written extensively on this and he was concerned that like the Genius Act by coming out and ostensibly saying that, oh, all the U.S.-based stablecoin issuers are now have 100% reserves, right?

That was one of the key features, and that's how the media reported it. But what they mean in that context is not what that would mean in normal banking, right? So normal banking in terms of checking accounts or something, if you put $100 in your checking account, and if the bank said, we have 100% reserves, they mean they have the currency in the vault, okay? But with the Genius Act, in the stablecoin context, to say 100% reserves, it meant they're sitting on T-bills, right? And so even though, yeah, T-bills are safer than 30-year mortgages, that's not literally the same thing. So that's one element that you still could have a run on the stablecoin issuers.

And if they're just sitting on T-bills, they actually couldn't pay people. So that's one element. But then the other issue that Alex Pollack raised was that right now, one of the things that could qualify as being fully reserved under the Genius Act is deposits with an FDIC insured bank. But but you could so there could be a stable coin issue where they could have a billion dollars in a bank deposit and then say, yeah, we're fully backed up. But if that bank itself is not 100 percent reserves, which they're not, then you'd see that issue. It was Silicon Valley Bank and Circle. You saw that play out in real time where there was a concern until it was resolved that they're going to be rescued that people didn't know. If the stablecoin issuer has its funds in a conventional bank and that bank is susceptible to a run, what are you going to do? So so that's my issue with the stable because right now is I'm concerned that by the government coming in and ostensibly making it safe for everybody by insisting 100 percent reserves that might lull the public into a false sense of security that actually if there were a run that, you know, the reserves wouldn't be there to back it up.

My last question for you is the BLS data. I've been a very big bear. I've been very big critic of the quality of the data, the accuracy of the data. We now have things like Truflation that have come up, you know, some other real-time alternative metrics. How do you, when you are evaluating the U.S. economy, what data sets are you looking at? Do you believe the government data? Do you look at things like Truflation? I do look at those, like Truflation and things like that.

So I definitely think that the official government numbers, like the U.S. government's numbers are more credible than, like, the Chinese government's numbers and things like that. But again, but this is all, you know, it's a pretty big curve that we're grading on, right? And so the thing that's interesting with economics is that I like to tell people is I can tell you just about any story you want, and I don't even have to lie, right? Like if I want to show that, oh, consumer prices actually went down last year, I can just throw in stuff like hedonic quality adjustments and say stuff like, oh, yeah, like the smartphones are better now than they were five years ago. And so because of that, even though the price went up, the quality per dollar you're getting is actually higher. And so therefore they're cheaper. Right. You can do stuff like that. And it's not that that's a crazy adjustment. But the point is, when you give yourself that many degrees of freedom, you can kind of tell any story you want. And so, yes, in general, the government statisticians working in these places, depending on how they feel ideologically, you know, they can they can tell the story one way or the other, you know, depending on what either their direct boss wants or what they think, you know, the big boss wants to hear.

So, so yeah, I don't trust that stuff in general. I mean, I think everybody kind of knows just going to the grocery store over the last five years, things are more expensive now than the official numbers indicated. So I think that in general, yeah, the government's numbers have been downplaying the price inflation we've seen, you know, since the COVID era. It is, it is pretty crazy to me. I also love when people confuse inflation and price, you know, inflation can come down, but price can stay up. And, you know, eventually people will, we'll get it right. Dr. Murphy, Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

Well, sure. Thanks for having me. Infineo, I'm the chief economist. If people go to infineo.ai, they can see all the work we're doing there, putting life insurance on the blockchain. And then I'm also with the Mises Institute at mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G. And I'm Bob Murphy Econ on Twitter.

Amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. We'll definitely have you back and do it again in the future. Thank you.