Where is the Inflation?

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

The price of gold fell off like 35%. Therefore the inflation rate is -35%.

The personal worth of Vetteman fell like 35%. Therefore... actually wait not one shit was given.

 

[koalabear]

The price of gold fell off like 35%. Therefore the inflation rate is -35%.

The personal worth of Vetteman fell like 35%. Therefore... actually wait not one shit was given.

You ate all the shit StinkyMORON.

 

[RobDownSouth]

The concept of "money neutrality" (initially coined by Hayek) makes the rabid retards over at Mises.org break out in hives.

Naturally, paste eaters like the Vettepussy embrace attacks on money neutrality whole-heartedly.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Nonetheless, I shredded your fucking argument once again. Own it.

Posting an irrelevant glibertarian tin-foil-hat whiny op-ed is now "shredding"?

Just how many lead paint chips DID you eat when you were a kid?

 

[unregistered]

 

[Ishmael]

You are a most perfected asshole, aren't you? Irrelevant my ass. Admit you're an uninformed dunce. Be a man instead of a swine for once.

Oh, just let him deal with his social disease.

Ishmael

 

[mercury14]

Nonetheless, I shredded your fucking argument once again. Own it.

You pasted a RW opinion. You did nothing at all.

 

[RobDownSouth]

You pasted a RW opinion. You did nothing at all.

"Doing nothing at all" seems to be one of the few constants in his life.

It goes a long way towards explaining why he's been unemployed for over a decade.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Fed's Money Trap
Hugh de Payns, American Thinker
August 5, 2013

The Federal Reserve, and therefore the economy, is caught on the horns of a dilemma of our own making.

ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and the aggressive pumping of money (upwards of $85 billion a month) into the financial system have tripled our money supply.

*

If it weren't for nearly stagnant money velocity (MZ), we would be seeing inflation / CPI in the 20% range or more.

This disruption of the money supply has sent confusing signals to both markets and Main Street, distorting prices and misallocating resources as the newly created dollars search for opportunities to earn a return.

Housing is perhaps the canary in the coal mine telling us that things are not going well and danger is close by.

*

Even with 3% 30 year mortgages and no money down, we have to go back to 1997 to see such such low levels of home ownership in America.

New housing starts, while showing some improvement, are still quite weak perhaps even stalling out. We now see a return to the Adjustable Rate Mortgage, a financial vehicle at least partially at fault for exacerbating the housing bubble.

Recently doctorhousingbubble had a terrific article on this strange phenomenon:

"At the same time, we find out that the home ownership rate continues to fall reaching a multi-decade low while rental vacancies slowly decline. All of this of course makes sense given a supply constrained market and a massive amount of investor buying over the last few years adding rental properties to the market (taking off market potential single-family homes for actual purchase). What is troubling about the data is the difficulty for first-time buyers to enter into this odd market. Having a larger share of our market as renters might make sense given economic constraints of household incomes yet it should be abundantly clear who the big winners were from all the Quantitative Easing that has occurred. Welcome to rental nation."

*

An increase in home prices but a recent and very pronounced slump in housing starts and softening demand for new mortgages! What's up with that? Essentially we are seeing banks sit on vacant properties and then very deliberately slow walk foreclosures through the system in order to both keep retail prices high by lowering inventories and to protect their balance sheets. In essence, if banks should err by releasing too many homes into the marketplace, housing prices will decline and so will the value of their assets, potentially putting them at risk of insolvency. At the same time, new housing is very soft, as too many young couples are both priced out of the market and are slogging through adverse economic currents that limit both opportunity and growth of income.

But now a new element has injected itself into the mix. Rising interest rates.

*

The most important number in the economy may be the yield on the ten year treasury. Factoring out the imbecility of the Jimmy Carter years, historically a 10 year yield has been around 5%. Now take a good look at the graph below. Notice that yield basically hit bottom last year. Frankly, it really could not go much lower than it was without going nearly zero, which is impractical.

Folks, rates really have no place to go but up. In the last few weeks the yield on a 10 year treasury has climbed significantly, and it seems on pace to break into 3% in the moderate future. But here is the fix we find ourselves in: it seems rates will have to come up, but if they do (and the side question is how much and how quickly), it will increase the cost of borrowing money for the government, potentially blowing up our budget and starting a debt spiral (see Greece for specific details). Rising rates also impact business investors, and private citizens.

What does this mean for housing? Basically rising rates mean purchasers can afford less home, meaning either prices have to come down or risky loans have to be pushed into the system.

If rates do not go up, a severe disconnect develops between the bond markets and the economy itself. Eventually the bond vigilantes will saddle their horses and as history has shown, they will have their way, and in the process destabilize arrogant governments. It has happened before, sometimes to the point of collapse.

Damned if we do. Damned if we don't.

This is what happens when we elect leaders who brazenly ignore mathematics and the laws of economics.

Math wins.

We lose.

And you can take that, my friends, to the bank.

* See charts: http://www.americanthinker.com/prin.../articles/../2013/08/the_feds_money_trap.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Let Them Eat Wind
Bruce Walker, American Thinker
August 5, 2013

Blue-collar workers, especially those connected with labor unions who mine coal, drill for oil and gas, build pipelines, and toil in all those related areas of genuine economic activity, must be appalled. Barack Obama won re-election largely on the willingness of those types of unions to put aside their doubts about his real commitment to economic growth and to turn out by a two-to-one margin for him.

That was decisive in states with large industrial unions: Ohio (18 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Iowa (6 electoral votes), New Hampshire (4 electoral votes), and Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). Obama's margin of victory in Florida was so tiny that without labor support, its 29 electoral votes would almost certainly have gone to Romney. Not only did unions deliver the electoral college majority to Obama, but if union voters had given Obama only a small majority, then Romney would have won the popular vote as well.

Now with the arrogance of the Ancien Régime of France, whose members led luxurious and insulated lives built on the work and sweat of their countrymen, Obama is effectively telling the growing class of poor Americans whose drop from the middle class is the consequence of leftist elitism that instead of recharging the American economy by real means -- using our vast amounts of coal and also oil and gas to create employment, providing federal and state governments with income (royalties) which do not require taxes, and making reducing the flow of dollars out of our nation -- that they should be content with the panacea of windmills, solar energy, and other impractical schemes.

Marie Antoinette was reported as saying, "Let them eat cake" in response to reports that Frenchmen had no bread. Likewise, Obama tells Americans who have no jobs, "Let them eat wind."

 

[RobDownSouth]

The Fed's Money Trap
Hugh de Payns, American Thinker
August 5, 2013





* See charts: http://www.americanthinker.com/prin.../articles/../2013/08/the_feds_money_trap.html

Want to go "full Karen" and hazard a guess on exactly when that nasty ole hyperinflation you've been promising us will come to pass?

...didn't think so.

:nods: