The True Value Of Money (Literally)

As a follow up bonus from the Artemis presentation earlier, we present this chart which answers the age old question: what is the true value of money? It does so in quite a literal fashion, and explains why Kyle Bass is such a fan of nickels...

As a reminder, from Michael Lewis' book on Kyle Bass:

On nickels:

He still owned stacks of gold and platinum bars that had
roughly doubled in value, but he remained on the lookout for hard
stores of wealth as a hedge against what he assumed was the coming
debasement of fiat currency. Nickels, for instance.

“The value of the metal in a nickel is worth six point eight cents,” he said. “Did you know that?”

I didn’t.

“I just bought a million dollars’ worth of them,” he said, and then,
perhaps sensing I couldn’t do the math: “twenty million nickels.”

“You bought twenty million nickels?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How do you buy twenty million nickels?”

“Actually, it’s very difficult,” he said, and then explained that he
had to call his bank and talk them into ordering him twenty million
nickels. The bank had finally done it, but the Federal Reserve had its
own questions. “The Fed apparently called my guy at the bank,” he says.
“They asked him, ‘Why do you want all these nickels?’ So he called me
and asked, ‘Why do you want all these nickels?’ And I said, ‘I just
like nickels.’”

He pulled out a photograph of his nickels and handed it to me. There
they were, piled up on giant wooden pallets in a Brink’s vault in
downtown Dallas.

“I’m telling you, in the next two years they’ll change the content
of the nickel,” he said. “You really ought to call your bank and buy
some now.”