I give a wrong time, stop a traffic line.

Happy Random Letters of the Alphabet (and now Numbers and Symbols) Pride Month!

Jun 07, 2022

Turkey’s state statistics agency is facing renewed scrutiny over transparency after it stopped publishing some details of how inflation data is calculated, fueling opposition claims it’s underreporting price gains that hit a 24-year high in May.

Great job covering Turkey, Bloomberg. Now take a close look at the BLS’s (that’d be in the United States) ridiculous CPI methodology for house prices or health insurance or men’s shirts. Look into their ridiculous hedonic-quality adjustments, weightings and substitutions. Try that.

Some 83% of respondents described the state of the economy as poor or not so good. More than one-third, or 35%, said they aren’t satisfied at all with their financial situation. That was the highest level of dissatisfaction since NORC began asking the question every few years starting in 1972…The survey results show that high inflation in particular is driving the dim economic outlook…

What? Not satisfied? Have you not seen the S&P 500 spike over six-fold since the dark days of 2009? (yes, still, even after the worst market crash since the 1300’s).

Oh yeah…

…a substantial number of Americans saw the rising stock market not as a gauge of economic revitalization but as an infuriating reminder that the financial overclass responsible for the crisis not only got off scot-free but was also getting richer in the bargain. The iniquity stung. One complaint voters at campaign rallies still share with me is that no Wall Street figure of any consequence served jail time as a result of the meltdown. By contrast, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted more than 1,000 bankers after the savings and loan crisis of the 1990s...

Just a quick reminder about who owns equities in the U.S.:

You can learn a lot about inflation from Federal Reserve Comic books.

This is from an actual New York Fed comic book. The Fed wasn’t always insane.

Sure, blame everything except our Central Banker serial arsonists:

As DeepThroatIPO wrote in January 2019, what’s happening today "has nothing to do with the Trade War, White House Tweets, the Wall, the Shutdown, Democrats, Republicans, Mexicans, Russians or Bob Mueller...it has everything to do with a decade of horrific, politically motivated, easy way out, global monetary policy."

OK, so according to the same types who spiked wealth inequality to record highs and murdered the middle-class, while not criminally prosecuting any white-collar criminals ever since Ken Lay got put away, real US 10-year rates are positive?? Is that right.

Here’s how non-economists (i.e., normal people) would do that math: the 10-year is at this second at 2.97%. The OFFICIAL (i.e., bullshit) CPI is 8.2%.

Using math, that’d be 2.97% minus 8.2% which would give us…using my toes…NEGATIVE 5.23%. So shut up about how positive 10-year real-rates are.

"People are going to go make a prediction about inflation based on TIPS prices? That's nuts. The whole thing's manipulated." - Harley Bassman

A storm of bankruptcies is on the horizon, experts warn Your future dream is a shopping scheme…

During the first three months of the year, around 137,000 businesses closed their doors for good in the UK, a jump of nearly a quarter on the same period in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). There were also nearly 5,000 voluntary insolvencies in England and Wales – the highest level since the Insolvency Service launched its quarterly survey in 1960.

Excellent new discussion from Demetri Kofinas: The New Era of Great Power Competition | John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt

Money Quote: “It really does make you wonder about the quality of American leadership.”

“Boy, they will have to do some sincere thinking within the European Central Bank over the next couple of months, because - let’s just remind ourselves - they are still buying bonds in the QE program, and inflation is running at 16.4% in annualized terms over the past three months. That’s just crazy.” - Andreas Steno Larsen

This got me banned for a day back in 2018…

From the 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now?

‘Young people, before the war, we had a comfortable fifty thousand marks. And now that money’s all gone. How can it be all gone?’ she asked anxiously. ‘An old lady can’t spend that much, can she?’
‘Inflation,’ said Pinneberg, cautiously.
‘It can’t have all gone,’ said the old lady, unheeding. ‘I sit here reckoning it up. I’ve written it all down. I sit here, reckoning. Here it says: a pound of butter: three thousand marks…can a pound of butter cost three thousand marks?’
‘In the inflation…’ began Lammchen, joining in.
‘I’m going to tell you. I now know that my money’s been stolen. Somebody who rented here stole it. I sit and wonder who. But I can’t recall the names, so many people have lived here since the war. I sit and brood. I also realize it must have been someone really clever, because he falsified my housekeeping book so I wouldn’t notice. He turned three into three thousand without me realizing.’
Lammchen looked despairingly at Pinneberg. Pinneberg didn’t look up.
‘Fifty thousand … how can fifty thousand have all gone? I’ve sat here and reckoned up everything I’ve bought in the years since my husband died: stockings and a few blouses. I had a lovely trousseau and I don’t need much. I’ve written it all down and it doesn’t even come to five thousand, I’m telling you.’
‘But money has been devalued,’ Lammchen tried again.