I was once an economist at the Department of Labor studying and measuring inflation. Not consumer inflation (CPI), but producer inflation (PPI).

The printing of money is inflationary "all else constant". This is like in physics the speed of light in a "vacuum". If we look outside the vacuum and accept that almost nothing is constant we can see that the long term trend has been towards aggregate deflation for a few decades now.

If we break up inflation we do see that some sectors have gone through deflation while other sectors have gone through inflation or hyperinflation. The cost of buying homes and the cost of education have skyrocketed. The price of food like McDonald's have plummeted.

In my first job I worked for $3.75 an hour and a Big Mac extra value meal was $2.99 which meant one minimum wage hour could buy 1 meal for me. The minimum wage in the Bay Area is now at $15 an hour which lets you buy about 2 Big Mac extra value meals. Housing and education is the opposite. You need a lot more minimum wage hours to pay for education and housing now.

The bigger lesson and your video accurately points to this is that we need to look at where the money is going. A lot of the Fed liquidity, low interest rates, tax cuts, and stimulus over the last 12 years have gone into the hands of a certain class of people. That class people have spent there money in certain areas and you see inflation in all of the areas in which THEY spend their money.

The VC's, tech executives, and tech employees is where a lot of printed money is flowing to. The consequence is inflation everywhere that they spend money. VC's spend money investing in tech companies so you see private equity and stock prices explode in price and you see this in their multiples. The tech elites also spend a lot of their money in the publicly traded shares and specifically in tech. This is why you see Price to Earnings ratios skyrocket specifically in tech stocks. These tech elites gentrify the areas that they move into, so you see an explosion of rent prices and housing prices in places they go to like the Bay Area. There also is an explosion in price in hipster coffee shops, craft beer, avocado toast, farm to table restaurants, and other weird stuff that is not in the CPI basket. These tech employees spend a lot of money on college education as well.

As you correctly stated though the long term and downstream effects are deflationary. Computers and smartphones in general are cheaper and widely adopted. Software operating systems along with a ton of other software is "free". Social media is "free". There is a lot of free and cheap stuff. Wage inflation for normal people have been kept at bay, in fact a lot of the data points to a declining "real wage" which implies deflation in labor prices.

Tech companies as a whole create a lot of products that are deflationary in nature. Zoom which you mentioned will have a lot of people working remote, so I expect a lot of tech workers will disperse over the "Sun Belt". Places in Texas like Austin and Houston are already gentrifying (inflation) and prices here in the Bay Area are starting to reverse (deflation). Zoom and other work from home technologies are going to disperse Silicon Valley a small amount and you are gonna see the seeds of a potential "Tech Belt" where the "Sun Belt" is. You can see the politics of Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and Georgia starting to shift. These tech millennials will not only bring their avocado toast with the, but their politics as well, but let me avoid the topic politics because this is not Leo Politics.

On aggregate there is a deflationary trend for sure. Good work on this video!