 Americans seem pretty happy with the economy right now. The stock market has recovered, unemployment is at a record low, and even gas prices have fallen off quite considerably. But there's also a state of confusion with regard to the economy. And it's not the type of confusion that has to do with weather balloons or anything like that, but with the government's economic reports. Retail sales, for example, came out hot recently, up 3%, which was the largest one month jump in quite a while, and that comes after a fairly weak Christmas season. So people are buying more right now, and retail sales are up significantly. On the other hand, price inflation, we also got a bad report out of that, where prices were up a half a percent, and year over year were up six and a half percent. So the monthly report was bad. The actual year over year report is stabilizing, actually, but prices are up along with spending. And then something that went largely unreported is that inventories are up at the wholesale and retail level. So businesses are adding to inventories because of some reason, maybe anticipated sales. We're not really quite sure. They've also been, of course, burned not having enough inventory in the COVID mess. And as a result, storage rates for warehousing are also up. So, you know, the stock market doesn't like some of those reports. But what is clear is that there's been an increase in the demand for goods. People want more retail goods. Businesses want more inventories. And there's a decrease in the demand for money, as businesses spend more on their inventories and people spend more on their consumption, driving up sales and driving up price inflation. So where does that leave us? Well, one of the possible explanations is that people are anticipating higher prices. So they're buying more, they're adding to inventories, they're accepting the rising prices in the economy in anticipation of future price increases. Now, what that will mean if it's true in terms of the economy is that we might experience renewed inflation. As I mentioned, gas prices have come down. Even egg prices, which get reported, those things have stabilized. But there's obviously some anticipation of higher prices in the economy. And so future price inflation reports may be higher. And it may actually have negative implications for the dollar and positive implications for physical actual assets in the economy.