When we say "people worry" about inflation, it's mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the '50s, '60s and '70s.

When you say "paying the banks," what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.

When you buy enough stocks to give you control of a target company, that's called mergers and acquisitions or corporate raiding. Hedge funds have been doing this, as well as corporate financial managers. With borrowed money you can take over or raid a foreign company too. So, you're having a monopolistic consolidation process that's pushed up the market, because in order to buy a company or arrange a merger, you have to offer more than the going stock-market price. You have to convince existing holders of a stock to sell out to you by paying them more than they'd otherwise get.

Oil now, as a result of the Saudi production, is priced so low that there are not going to be new fracking investments made. A lot of companies that have gone into fracking are heavily debt-leveraged, and are beginning to default on their loans. The next wave of defaults that banks are talking about is probably going to be in the fracking industry. When the costs of production are so much more than they can end up getting for the oil, they just stop producing and stop paying their loans.

Elites play the role today that landlords played under feudalism. They levy interest and financial fees that are like a tax, to support what the classical economists called "unproductive activity."

In real estate you can avoid ever having to pay a capital gains tax, decade after decade, century after century. When you sell a property and make a capital gain, you simply turn around and buy a new property. The gain is not taxed. It's called "preserving your capital investment" - which goes up and up in value with each transaction.

The vast majority of $100 bills are abroad, not in the United States. So yes, of course there's a use here but nowhere near as much as there's a use for $100 bills abroad.