As a consumer, I for one hope the value of the dollar falls (slowly of course). Housing is grotesquely overpriced. There is no way to reduce the cost of assets

As a consumer, I for one hope the value of the dollar falls (slowly of course). Housing is grotesquely overpriced. There is no way to reduce the cost of assets like real estate in nominal terms without mountains of pain. Housing can't go down without leaving recent purchasers underwater and triggering a banking crisis. The most orderly way for house prices to be made sane again would be for the value of the dollar to fall until a $500k starter home is "reasonable" in real value terms. Everyone gets a 1.5X-2X raise, a loaf of bread is $10, gas is $12/gallon, and now magically $500k for a starter house/condo is reasonable. Inflation is an ugly solution to an even uglier set of problems that revolve around the inelasticity of pricing and the blind spots of human psychology. It's almost impossible for the price of assets or wages to fall in an orderly fashion. The resistance is both structural and psychological. Market pricing mechanisms can't work if prices can't move in both directions. Inflation allows prices to fall and debt to be written down in a more silent less painful way. It's a hack to allow prices of all things to move in both directions and thus for market pricing signals to work. We may not need this hack if we were perfectly rational. A perfectly rational employee would understand if you cut their wages in nominal terms but explained that the value of the currency had increased. A perfectly rational bank would write down the value of underwater home loans to avoid a debt crisis. People do not behave like this. Banks will refuse to write down loan values unless other banks do (game theory), guaranteeing a disorderly debt crisis rather than an orderly haircut. People will always feel like they got a pay cut if number go down regardless of purchasing power. I pick on real estate, wages, and loans because they are probably the least elastic in terms of nominal price. For those number must always go up (or at least stay the same) or really bad things happen. Other things are still at least somewhat subject to the same forces to varying degrees.