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chazza

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Posts posted by chazza

  1. Sell gold, by Treasuries:

     

    "...Price increases are simply more noticeable — more salient, as psychologists would say — than price decreases. Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size. If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you’re really unhappy. You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn’t notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago.

     

    There is also something particular to inflation that aggravates loss aversion. Price increases are obvious. But price declines are often hidden. The cost of an item stays about the same for years, while everything else gets more expensive and nominal incomes rise.

    ...

    The final piece of the puzzle — and the focus of the Harper’s article — is the way that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the price index recently. Back in the mid-1990s, a committee of academic economists concluded that the Consumer Price Index overstated inflation. To take just one example, years would often pass before the index included new products — like cellphones — and therefore it missed the enormous price declines that occurred shortly after those products entered the mainstream.

     

    ...“It’s about as accurate as anybody is going to get it,” Mr. Cecchetti said.

     

    That said, there is one way in which the official numbers were clearly understating inflation. To track housing costs, the Consumer Price Index analyzes rents, not home prices. (Why? Long story.) And rents didn’t go up anywhere near as much as house prices during the real estate boom. So the index missed the huge run-up in home values that made life harder on anyone trying to buy a first home.

     

    Since 2006, of course, home prices have been falling. But rents have kept rising slowly, which means that, as far as the Consumer Price Index is concerned, housing has somehow gotten more expensive during the real estate crash.

     

    So when the new inflation numbers come out next week, they will indeed be misleading. They will be artificially high."

     

     

     

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/business...amp;oref=slogin

     

     

     

  2. Interesting to read Plutos comments over the past couple of pages. His thinking is very similar to mine in that the increase in money supply needs to find its way into the mainstream to keep supply rising and inflation ticking over.

     

    One thought is that with the Fed demonstrating that nothing is going to fail then we avoid in the short term a economic collapse and a contraction/deflation. The money injected into the financial system keeps the status quo operating and the we inflate the bubble further.

     

    On the other hand if a bank was left to implode, the dominoes would start and the current charade to keep the financial system afloat would not be required. So, take out all the recent injections (where they still can) and M3 falls of a cliff.

  3. Fannie, Freddie Surplus Capital Requirement Is Eased

     

    ``It's critical for them to have additional capital,'' Lockhart said at the new conference. ``These companies are safe and sound and we're going to ensure by our everyday oversight that they continue to be safe and sound,'' Lockhart said.

     

    Uh? :lol:

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