Shills for Wall Street gamblers said that, even though prices for shit that ordinary people need to survive are skyrocketing, prices for shit they can do without are not going up quite as fast, thus justifying actions by the Fed that are going to further increase the rate of skyrocketing price increases for the shit that ordinary people need to survive, while at the same time floating a massive cash infusion to the Wall Street gamblers to bet with so they can try to keep making the same obscene profits they had been, supported by, and ultimately ended by, their own purposeful courses of action that inflated, and then burst, the housing bubble and secondary pile-of-shit-in-a-pretty-dress bubble.
(h/t to Mike the Mad Biologist)
What's weird and sad is that Economics, as a discipline, almost seems designed to bring problems like this upon itself. "Core Inlation" is a statistic that Economists use, and it measures inflation among non-essential items, but ignores inflation among food and energy prices. What is the effing point of that?
ReplyDeleteOr take the unemployment figures. People are considered unemployed if they are looking for a job, and don't have one. In practice this means that if lots of people are trying to get work, but can't get work, unemployment will be high. If, however, the economic malaise lasts so long that these people start to give up, the unemployment figure will apparently drop. In reality, it's only an artifact of the statistics-gathering apparatus.
It's stuff like this that makes me view Economic statements with skepticism.