Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour One.

Hello, America. Welcome. It is Eric Erickson here. The Eric Erickson Show across the nation.

Glad to have you with me. The phone number, if you want to be on the program,

87737-9-7-425. And we've got big news out of the gate that we have to get to.

To a lot of people, I understand this is probably not the biggest news, but it actually is the big news, and that is the Federal Reserve is expected

to raise interest rates today. What happens when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates?

Well, everything becomes more expensive to a degree as far as getting access to money.

So when I say more expensive, it's not like your gas prices are going to go up and your food

prices are going to go up more than they already have.

Actually, raising interest rates is designed to bring that back down.

What happens is it takes money out of the economy.

Now, I've mentioned this before, and I've got to go back to this. The Romans headed into their crisis in the second century in large part because of inflation.

They did not understand it. They did not have economists at the time who understood this. But essentially

what happened is they had so many soldiers. The emperor needed to be able to pay them. And so they were

paid in real silver, contrary to popular belief that they were paid in salt. They really weren't.

By the time of the Roman Empire, Roman soldiers were getting paid in silver or gold coins.

There wasn't enough. So they had to make alloys to continue to get them the money. And so the coin was no longer purely silver. It had alloys mixed to it. And so it technically was supposed to have the same

value. But suddenly, it really wasn't worth the same amount of money. There was an oversupply of the money.

They could print so many of the same coins with the alloy. They weren't pure silver. And the result was

that food prices went through the roof. In addition to having droughts and shortages, food prices began to go through the roof. Now, why? Because the soldiers

paid in these readily available coins, put it into the market, had an oversupply of money

in the market, allowing people to buy more stuff and to control the supply and the supply

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