You're Not Imagining It.
You Are Getting Poorer.

You're not bad with money. You haven't been reckless. You've done the things you were supposed to do — worked hard, saved a little, maybe bought a home or tried to. And yet there's this persistent, nagging sense that the ground is slowly shifting beneath your feet. That last year's salary doesn't stretch as far as this year's.

Most people who feel this way assume they're doing something wrong. The self-help industry agrees — budget better, spend less on coffee, invest in yourself. But the feeling isn't a personal failure. It's an accurate read of a structural economic reality that mainstream conversation rarely names clearly.

The economy is creating money faster than it's creating value. And the newly created money isn't reaching you first.

Since 2015, the US money supply — the technical measure called M2, which includes cash, deposits, and short-term savings — has grown by 91%. If you had a dollar in 2015, there are now almost two dollars chasing the same goods and services you could buy then.

Basic economic theory says more money chasing the same things means prices rise. And they have — by about 34% over that period. So why isn't the 91% increase showing up as 91% higher prices?

The "missing" inflation — the 57-point gap between how much money was created and how much consumer prices rose — didn't disappear. It flowed into assets that ordinary people don't own much of. And then it stayed there.

There's a measurement economists use called money velocity — essentially, how many times a dollar changes hands in a year. A high velocity means money is active, circulating through wages, spending, businesses, wages again. A low velocity means money is pooling somewhere, sitting still.

Velocity has been falling for a decade. Each dollar created today turns over fewer times than a dollar created in 2015. The economy is producing more money, but that money is doing less work — for most people.

The reason velocity keeps falling leads to an uncomfortable but increasingly well-documented conclusion: as wealth concentrates at the top, money circulates less. A person living paycheque to paycheque spends nearly everything they receive almost immediately — high velocity. A billionaire receiving the same dollar parks it in a fund, where it buys an asset, which appreciates, and never returns to the real economy as spending. Low velocity.

The wealthier a society becomes at the top, the slower its money moves at the bottom.

Here's the part that makes the feeling make sense. There are effectively two economies operating simultaneously, priced in the same currency, but responding to completely different forces.

When the government creates new money, it enters the financial system first — through bond markets, bank reserves, institutional investors. By the time it reaches wages and consumer spending, the people at the top of the financial system have already positioned themselves to benefit from the resulting asset price increases.

You experience the inflation. They experience the appreciation. Same monetary event. Opposite outcomes.

This is why homeownership feels increasingly out of reach even as the economy is described as "strong." The strength is real — it's just concentrated in the asset-holding class. House prices aren't high because houses got better. They're high because the money that was created found its way into property, bidding up the very thing you're trying to buy with income rather than capital.

The situation doesn't correct itself, partly because the people it benefits have every resource needed to ensure it continues. This isn't a conspiracy — it's just the rational operation of incentives at scale.

Wealthy individuals have access to a parallel financial infrastructure: accountants who find legal structures that reduce effective tax rates far below headline rates, wealth managers who allocate into instruments unavailable to retail investors, lawyers who protect assets across generations through trusts and estate structures, and political influence that shapes the regulatory environment those instruments operate in.

Every policy intervention — higher taxes, tighter regulations, monetary tightening — arrives after the people it's intended to affect have already been advised of its implications and repositioned accordingly. The rules are written in English but effectively operate in a language only available to those who can pay for translation.

The Consumer Price Index — the official inflation measure — tracks a basket of goods: groceries, petrol, clothing, healthcare, rent. It does not track the price of buying a house. It tracks the equivalent rent you'd pay to live in one. It does not track stock prices, fine art, or private equity returns.

This means the official inflation figure systematically underweights the things that determine whether you're building wealth or just treading water. Your rent might be rising at 3% per year while house prices in your city rise at 12%. CPI registers the former. Your financial reality includes the latter.

You feel poorer not because the official numbers are wrong — they're measuring what they measure accurately. You feel poorer because the official numbers aren't measuring the part of the economy that determines long-term financial security. Asset inflation is real inflation. It just affects people differently depending on which side of the ownership line they're on.