Balaji Srinivasan keeps fighting inflation and losing

Ultra-wealthy former Coinbase exec Balaji Srinivasan keeps single-handedly betting on inflation winning — and in doing so, makes losing look easy.

While the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Congress do everything in their power to fight inflation, Srinivasan made one of the worst public-facing financial bets in history. He proposed in April that inflation would be so bad that Bitcoin would surpass a value of $1,000,000 a coin within three months.

Srinivasan gave up prematurely and paid up 47 days later — 44 days before he had to. Of course, he still claimed a moral victory. The former Coinbase exec released a video stating, “I burned a million to tell you they’re printing trillions.”

Now, a platform that offers “a new inflation truth-set to provide reliable financial data for better decision-making” is reporting lower inflation than the official numbers coming from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Balaji Srinivasan wanted “real inflation numbers” but not like this

In April last year, Truflation announced that it had won $200,000 from Srinivasan for building a product that presented real inflation numbers, suggesting that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers reported by the US government “have a vested interest in downplaying inflation.”

Fast-forward a year later and the hypothesis that the CPI was faked may turn out to be accurate — but not in the way that Srinivasan hoped.

Truflation reported its most recent numbers and, as pointed out by Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, they actually came in significantly lower than those reported by the US government. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a number between 4% and 5%, Truflation reported inflation rates as low as 2.2%.

It’s funny. Tech people and gold people love to talk about how the government manipulates CPI data, and that some private company with modern techniques could do a better job characterizing the real numbers.

And then a company does it and says inflation is just over 2% https://t.co/FJHRDP1gvf

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 3, 2023

This flies in the face of what Srinivasan keeps insisting is a US economy on the brink of hyperinflation and collapse — a government keen to only print money for printing money’s sake.

The $1.2 million Srinivasan has lost on his bets regarding inflation doesn’t personally amount to much. There are no accurate estimates on his wealth but it’s safe to say it adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars or more.

If anything, the attention he’s gotten from the bad bets may, somehow, earn him enough money to make up for it.

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