Overall inflation reversed course and ticked higher in August 2023 on a monthly jump in overall energy prices

 Overall inflation jumped up to 3.7% year-over-year and 0.6% month-over-month on a 5.6% jump in overall energy inflation month-over-month in August 2023.

Month-over-month, electricity was up 0.2%, gasoline was up 10.6%, piped utility gas was up 0.6%, fuel oil and other fuels were up 8.4%. Meanwhile food was up 0.2%.

Core inflation (overall inflation less food and energy) increased mom 0.3% and is still running 4.4% yoy.

Services inflation is still running high at 5.4% yoy, less rent of shelter at 3.1% yoy.

Shelter inflation rose mom 0.3% in both measures, and 7.2% yoy seasonally adjusted.

Going forward I expect inflation pressures to persist because of Biden administration green energy fantasies and hatred of fossil fuels combining with OPEC+ production cuts continuing indefinitely. 

July inflation go boink

 

Core inflation has been above 5% year over year for 16 months, overall inflation at or above 5% for 22 months

 

Year over year in December, broad inflation is down for six consecutive months, core inflation is down three consecutive months

 

But there's still a long way to go to get to 2-ish percent in either category.

The Fed Funds Rate will be kept higher for longer.

Clearly the interest rate beatings will have to continue until stock market morale improves

It's a small point, but the stock market cheerleaders, who are ubiquitous, consistently report year over year inflation as 7.7% when it's 7.8%.

Nothing must get in the way of the narrative, especially convention.

Meanwhile, the inflation regime is a giant wealth transfer scheme from you to them. But student loan forgiveness was the anesthetic to make young skulls full of mush forget on Tuesday.

 

Republicans hate it when the Consumer Price Index declines, as it just did from June to July 2022

 It causes cognitive dissonance. Zero increase to the index, zero percent inflation!

See how easy that is?

Shouldn't they be able to understand Rush Limbaugh style math by now when they hear it from the president himself? Or was the Rush Limbaugh Show all for nothing?

Sad!

Perverse anti-capitalist AP Obama says inflation had been under control since the early 1980s, blames inflation now on "robust recovery from the pandemic"

 You can't make this shit up.

AP Obama, here:

Inflation in the United States, which had been under control since the early 1980s, resurged with a vengeance just over a year ago, largely a consequence of the economy’s unexpectedly robust recovery from the pandemic recession. The rebound caught businesses by surprise and led to shortages, delayed shipments — and higher prices.

Inflation averaged 4.75% 1981-1990 inclusive. You can't call that "under control". The FedFunds rate averaged 9.4% over that same period. The one halved your nest egg in about 15 years while the other halved what was left in 7.5.

If that's success I'd hate to see failure.

While the Fed fiddles around with interest rates as if they controlled anything, oh look! over there! a deer!, it has presided over an orgy of balance sheet expansion of $7.7 trillion since 2008 as the Treasury has flooded the economy with $1.5 trillion in new currency and the Congress of idiots has spent us blind with $15.75 trillion beyond the 2008 baseline ballooning the total debt to $30 trillion by the end of 2021 so that it's three times the size that it was just 14 years ago.

An economy which runs only on going deep into debt is not a capitalist economy.

It's a Chinese communist economy.

  

Stonks laugh again after Powell's miserable 75 basis point hike to fight inflation

 The rate is now 1.52% vs. CPI up 8.5% year over year and the all commodities Producer Price Index up 21.5% year over year.

This isn't being tough.

It's a joke perpetrated on an ignorant public like all the other jokes of our time, like George Floyd, Caitlin Jenner, and Jan 6.

 

All Items Consumer Price Index under Jerome Powell isn't capturing inflation like it did under Arthur F. Burns even though they both increased money supply at about the same rate

Currency in Circulation (CURRCIR) under Arthur F. Burns rose at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.64% from Feb 1970 to March 1978. The Consumer Price Index (CPIAUCSL) rose at a compound annual growth rate of 6.49%.

After four years of Jerome Powell, Feb 2018 to Feb 2022, Currency in Circulation rose at a similar 8.41% CAGR but the CPI only at 3.31% CAGR, almost 50% less than under Burns.

Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”

Something is rotten in CPI Denmark.

Democrats won control of all the important levers of federal government in 2020, but "democracy is on life support"

I'll say.

With Democracy on Life Support, GOP Wants to Pull Plug

Brad Bannon, The Hill

 

Democracy as brought to you by Democrats in 2020 has meant surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan, 

 

The Science ™ mutating every four weeks,

 

doubling down on a vaccine which hasn't "shut down the virus", 

 

a 30.5% increase to currency in circulation since Democrats took the House in 2018,

 

inflation raging by nearly 11% over the period and people pretending not to know why,

 

the purchasing power of the US dollar falling by 9.6%,

 

the total public debt up $8 trillion, 37%, 

missing full-time jobs of at least 13 million,

 

illegal immigration soaring under Biden to the third-highest in 97 years, 

 

toleration of unprecedented race riots and violent crime in every major American city,

 

designating parents irate over public schools propagandizing students about race "terrorists",

 

and that's just off the top of my head, which I still have because Democrats don't own the Supreme Court . . . yet.

 

 

 

 

 

Consumer Prices Up 8.4% Under Four Years Of Obama

The Consumer Price Index is up 8.4% under four years of Obama (November 2008 to November 2012).

Similarly measured, the CPI rose 10.05% in the first term of George W. Bush, 11.15% in the second term.

The worst record in the post-war period was Carter's four years when CPI rose over 47%. In Eisenhower's first term CPI rose just 3.07%.

Measured from April 1973 (after the world went to a floating exchange rate system of currencies in the wake of the end of the gold standard in August 1971) to April 1999, 26 years, CPI raged 280% (a factor of 10.8 per year).

From April 1947 to April 1973 (CPI data not available before 1947), CPI rose a comparatively more modest 99% over 26 years (a factor of 3.8 per year).

For the 13 years since 1999, April to April, CPI has risen just 38% (a factor of 2.9 per year).

A composite of measures for the consumer bundle going back to the year 1900 at measuringworth.com here provides an interesting tool for comparison purposes.

While the dollar suffered a 446% decline for the 73 years between 1900 and 1973, a factor of 6.1 per year, in the 38 years between 1973 and 2011 the 406% decline is a factor of 10.7 per year, 75% worse per year since moving to a floating exchange rate currency system.

Viewed more broadly from the point of view of gold, from 1932 (the year of FDR's election and before his massive 69% devaluation of the gold-linked dollar in the spring of 1933) to the present day, the devaluation of the dollar has been in excess of 1500%.

From 1790 to 1932 the dollar declined just 54%.

At this hour, gold is $1,656.80 the ounce, $1,636.13 the ounce higher than it was in 1932, the last year of its fixed price at $20.67 the ounce, just another way of expressing the devaluation of the dollar.