It is costing more to live and be, so naturally people are looking for who it is they need to blame. Maybe figure out some way to stop it. You know and feel for the basics since everyone’s perceptions begin with costs of just living. This is what makes the subject of inflation so difficult, even more so in the [...]
For the first time in a couple of months, only a couple of months, no one will be able to say that inflation rates are the highest in…a very long time. According to the BLS and its latest CPI estimates for the month of July 2021, consumer prices are still well higher than they had been during July 2020 but [...]
Trillions in “stimulus”, American consumers buying goods at a frenetic pace (in lieu of services), gasoline prices punishing, the start of favorable base effects, yet all those things couldn’t push the inflation rate much further beyond the Federal Reserve’s 2% explicit target. And remember, in order to meet the newly designed economic goals on the inflation side – average inflation [...]
According to the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure, the PCE Deflator, consumer price pressures remained muted in January 2021. No surprise, given the absence of inflationary conditions contained within the prior released CPI report for the same month, as even the contribution from surging oil prices was noticeably minimal in both. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) today said that [...]
Japan is just the name of a group of large islands on the far side of the Pacific from the United States. For most people, there’s not much else more to say beyond the charm of weird, ofttimes masochistic tendencies embedded within the inscrutably fascinating Japanese gameshows. Maybe something about suicidal demographics. The financial media has done such a poor [...]
Is there a charmed fiscal number that unlocks the inflationary promised-land? Central bank Economists have spent more than a decade in the West, two in Japan, desperately seeking the magic number QE. Though their own research is substantial and conclusive that LSAP’s like QE don’t work, and never have, officials conclude instead that it always comes up short because it [...]
Before the word “taper” ever left the lips of anyone occupying an official position at the Federal Reserve in the late spring of 2013, there was already something very much amiss. Not that you would have known it, of course. In the financial media, everything was moving along swimmingly, Bernanke the thrice-crowned hero. QE4 had been dutifully buried by its [...]
If you have to work overtime just to catch up to where you were supposed to be, you haven’t done a good job. It’s really that simple. And in the context of inflation, therefore legitimate economic growth as distinguished from fake booms, that’s really all bond yields are.The lower rates go, and the longer they stay lower, the more they [...]
Is three weeks a new record? That’s about how long Jay Powell’s performance bought him across most major markets. It was May 17, a Sunday night, when he appeared on 60 Minutes and, pardon me again, lied his ass off. One right after another, starting with the most obvious falsehood that his gang at the Federal Reserve “saw it coming.” [...]
It’s now more than two months out from GFC2 and more importantly the Fed’s response to it. Why is Jay Powell’s reaction more important? Simple. Because it outlines what happens next. Had the FOMC been anywhere close to successful in anything other than convincing the media, GFC2 might’ve been a singular instance of disruption related to the non-economic shock of [...]
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