As stocks have hit new all-time highs in recent months, I’ve seen an increasing number of people argue that stocks aren’t becoming more valuable, the dollar is becoming less valuable. Investor Lee Roach articulated this “debasement theory” in a recent Twitter/X post: The federal government is running a 7% structural deficit with no political coalition in either party willing to address it. The Treasury is issuing debt at a pace that will push publicly held debt-to-GDP past 130% within five years, which is the level at which, historically, every government in recorded history has either inflated its way out, defaulted, or both. The Fed is, regardless of what it says in public, the marginal buyer of that debt, and the only mechanism it has to fund the purchases is the creation of new dollars. The money is being printed. The debt is being monetized. The currency is being debased. And asset prices, which are denominated in the currency being debased, are doing the only thing they have ever done in any country that has ever tried this, which is going up… The lesson is not that asset prices are going up because the businesses are getting better. The lesson is that asset prices are going up because the unit they are measured in is getting smaller, and any investor who positions short against this dynamic is betting against the will and capacity of a government to debase its own currency, which is the single most reliable bet you can lose in 4,000 years of recorded monetary history…. The only investors who will, in real terms, preserve and grow their wealth are the ones who understood, early, that the game is not about being right on valuation, it is about being on the right side of monetary debasement, and the right side has always been owning real assets, productive businesses, scarce commodities, and the one monetary metal that has functioned as money continuously for 5,000 years, while the people on the other side continue to insist this time is different. This time has never been different. The math is the math. The shorts will continue to lose. The owners will continue to win. Despite a few factual errors (e.g., Japan, the U.K., and other countries have gone beyond 130% debt-to-GDP without hyperinflation or default), Roach makes some valid points. For example, the U.S. government does have a spending problem that neither party can resolve. This is mostly due to large entitlement programs (like Social Security) that are extremely difficult to reform. For example, even if we uncapped the payroll tax (to apply above $184,500 in income for 2026 and beyond), about one-third of the funding shortfall for Social Security would remain. Why campaign for something so politically unpopular when it won’t solve the problem anyways? Additionally, Roach is right that, on a long enough timeline, inflation destroys a currency. And the best way to fight inflation is owning real, productive assets. Just Keep Buying, am I right? But this is where