Stop whining about inflation. It's "your fault," and you're "clueless."
Or so say the effete, nattering nabobs of financial journalism
Regular readers of this space are well aware of the cause of inflation. You can sum it up in one picture:
The mountain of new money on the right-hand side of the chart was created in US commercial banks at the behest of the United States Federal Reserve, abetted by Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the US Congress. This is the reason for soaring consumer prices in the last three years.
But you wouldn’t know this by reading the high-falutin financial media. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were shills for government economists.
First, they tried to blame higher prices on the devil himself, Vladimir Putin:
Next, they tried to pin inflation on those evil bastards in “Big Business” who took advantage of the spike in consumer prices to hike up their profit margins arbitrarily. The pundits coined a farcical portmanteau for this phenomenon: “greedflation.”
Joe Biden echoed this sentiment in a recent warning to corporations:
"Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt — it's time to stop the price gouging — giving the American consumer a break."
Readers may recall my demolition of this absurdity, in which I pointed out that inflation bloats nominal profits while damaging actual profitability.
Neither the Putin tale nor the “greedflation” fable ever got much traction, but the boobs of the financial press were not finished. Now they want to blame you. And they think you’re dumb enough to believe it’s your fault.
This staggering affront in the December 1 issue of The Atlantic says you are to blame for inflation. You’re the one spending so much on all the stuff - the turkeys, the cruises, the jewelry - when you could have spent less and bought “smaller packages” and “fewer things.”
“Things are going great, yet everyone is miserable,” claims the author. And “Americans have nobody to blame but themselves.”
Did you get that? Your standard of living has declined because prices have risen faster than your income, but you are at fault because you didn’t lie back and take it.
Then there’s this abomination that appeared in today’s Financial Times. It turns out you were clueless about inflation in the first place.
The author scolds us unwashed plebs because, he says, we constantly overestimate inflation and, even worse, we “don’t think like economists.” Thank god for that. Someone has to think rationally. But don’t expect rational thought from the government economists who compile inflation statistics. These dopes reify their numbers as if their “core” annual inflation rate of 3.8% represents your inflation experience. Never mind the 18% rise in the CPI over the last 18 months, as computed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a loss of purchasing power that may never be recovered. As bad as that number is, it’s an optimistic calculation.
Shadowstats.com computes consumer price increases according to the government’s methodology used in the 1980s. Their numbers might look more similar to what you are experiencing at the checkout counter - double-digit price increases going on three years. Not three or four percent.
But the Financial Times author doesn’t want you to believe your lying eyes.
Journalists and economists know what real inflation is. Maybe you should get your mind right.
And quit whining. You never had it so good.
HardmoneyJim
December 6, 2023