Saturday, August 27

Inflation and Asset Prices

If someone were to ask you what the current rate of inflation is, what would you say? Well, if your answer has anything to do with the CPI (consumer price index) number, you should think again.

Thorstein Polleit writes on the problem with using this index as the benchmark.

Massaging the perceptions of their populations is the oldest game in politics. Are things really as good as they say they are?

The Austrian economists were critical of the use of all indexing, for a number of reasons, and they argued against the use of aggregates that has come to dominate the world of macroeconomics.

The misuse of the (government created) CPI is but one example of how the U.S. government tries to put off the consequences of its own monetary manipulation, at first denying the existence of inflation, and then when no one buys that line anymore, blaming someone else for causing it in the first place.

But being that the nature of all governments is some combination of force and fraud, one could expect no more from them.

The interesting part is how mainstream economists, who have some degree of independence and intelligence, will don their tu-tu's, go before the cameras, and say their lines on cue; denying domestic inflation and blaming price increases on the greedy oil companies or some other villain of the moment.

Misdirection is essential for the scheme to work.

It's how all pickpockets operate.

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