> I could not disagree more. For much of human history, and most of American history, saving currency was exactly how you saved value. You already created value

> I could not disagree more. For much of human history, and most of American history, saving currency was exactly how you saved value. You already created value in exchange for the money; now you should be able to hold on to that value until you want to spend it. The fact that putting money under your mattress is no longer a viable strategy is why we have massive and growing wealth inequality. It is horribly unrealistic to assume that every person can or should become financially savvy enough to make smart investments in the global economy, and it is naive to think that just buying some index is efficiently allocating capital. Actually, predictably very low long term rates of inflation was one of the main causes of inequality for much of the period of human history for which we have reliable tax data (18th century to the beginning of the 20th century). When inflation is predictably low, and economic growth is low (as it has almost always been - the majority of growth is tied to population growth), the wealthy only need a modest after-tax rate of return on their capital in order to stay ahead of inflation and increase their relative wealth basically without bound. If inflation is high or erratic, then those debts which the wealthy rely on quickly disappear. As the chart in the OP shows, this was basically true in the United States throughout the 19th century and up until the eve of WWI, with the notable asterisk of the Civil War; it helps explain increases in inequality in the antebellum period and through the Gilded Age. It's even more clear if you look at the Insee statistics for CPI in 19th-century France, where inflation was consistently low and no disruptions on the level of the US Civil War occurred. (France on the eve of the first World War was staggeringly unequal - although the United States is fast heading towards that mark.)