The market can stay irrational longer than you can fund a put.

You can be right and still lose everything.

I did, but I bought them too early

Yes, it reduces burden of debt, but it makes taking on new debt a lot more expensive, because interest rates are closely related to inflation.

And if you have to pay back a debt (as you normally have to after a predetermined time), and have to refinance it by taking up new debt, now you might not be able to pay the now higher interest.

So for the one who pays off his credit card debt, inflation is a good thing. For the company that used that credit to invest in something that will only bring revenue at a future point in time, this is a real fucking problem (this is what is happening in Russia currently btw. Bankruptcies are skyrocketing there because of the high inflation and the even higher interest rate - and stalling domestic spending - , and that rate is being artificially kept "low" to boot. There has been an intense power struggle between the russian central bank and the Kremlin this year. Look up Elvira Nabiullina's "disappearance" this June)

If your wages do not rise at the same rate as inflation, your debt burden does not shrink.

Significant inflation leads to increased interest rates and this makes it more expensive to take on new debt.

Or, if a country has high inflation and does not increase interest rates, this can lead to money flowing out of the country.

Inflation can also affect consumer spending, and therefore, selling of future products. Whether the effect is positive or negative could depend on how much consumer spending is debt-financed.

if you are the one owing money, yes; if you are the one who is supposed to receive money, it is not so great. i would assume the ones worrying about this are the ones who are supposed to be receiving money? i am also an economics idiot

I don't know what the plan is. Double our electric bills, take our water, take our jobs, and expect everyone to pay monthly for your crappy generative AI that most people never asked for?

Nvidia is, but they spent it on the bubble

Well, yeah. It's usually not the principal that gets out of hand anyway. It's always the interest that gets ya.

POP! POP! POP!

Check it with a 1y or 5y window.

Both Silver and Gold climbed massively in the last 3 years (though they've been steadily climbing since around 2020) and hit a huge peak early this year and then came back down. Now they're both sitting at roughly were they were at the start of the year.

IMHO PMs are not really great speculative investments since they're not all that volatile (though early this year volatility was unusually high) and they're more mid and long term wealth holding mechanism in the face of Economic problems that hit major currencies making the value of those currencies (and hence all assets denominated in them) go down. It helps that actual physical metals (especially for Gold) are not managed by Governments or Central Banks - you cannot create new Gold beyond the roughly 2% mined per year hence there is no such thing as Gold interest rates so states can't just make more of it or tweak its long-term returns - hence it cannot be mismanaged, unlike government issued currencies.

In a long-term perspective it's not as much that you make money from PMs as it is that everybody else around you is getting poorer because their incomes, savings and assets are in a currency which is losing purchasing power, whilst you managed to retain the purchasing power of your savings.

From my own experience in the 2008 Crash, expect PMs to first go down as Markets plummet and traders are forced to sell in more stable and liquid assets (such as Gold) to cover margin calls in other areas, and then turn and start climbing fast as the crash hits the broader economy and hence the value of the main currencies (this time around, especially the USD) starts falling meaning that PM prices in those currencies go up.

Also keep in mind that Silver is very exposed to the status of the broader Economy since it's mainly used as an industrial metal, so if the Economy slows down, fewer products containing it are made hence demand for it goes down - Gold tends to be more insulated from the broader Economy than Silver.