Free Republic

Apart­ment rents are up. So are prices for restaurant meals, haircuts, gym memberships and a cup of coffee. For consumers who have become used to flat or even falling prices for years, an unfamiliar sight has emerged in many corners of the economy: Inflation is ticking up.

The deflationists argue that hugely accommodative monetary policy in the U.S., Japan (and nearly everywhere else in the world) has failed to produce real growth. Debt and obligations to social programs such as Medicare and pensions are so massive they can’t be paid. Therefore, according to deflation forecasters, they won’t be. Their predictions of default and accompanying bank failures, bankruptcies, and surging unemployment were bolstered by recent news out of Greece. Falling commodity prices and economic malaise have reemerged. They claim zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing merely delayed the inevitable for a bit. The inflation camp shares the...

We worry about our presidential primary process. Some wonder why. Some believe that we worry too much, and it all fixes itself in time; why get so worked up? Be patient, they say, the primaries will handle it, and then comes the election, don’t worry so much. And if you’re not in an early primary state, you have no effect anyway, so you’re better off saving your energy and just watching TV or going to a game. So we’re told, especially by friends and acquaintances who just don’t think it all matters that much, and who wonder why we’re willing...

Things are not so sweet for the sugar market. Prices have been tumbling and reached a six-year low on Monday on news that Brazil's cane growers are in for a bumper harvest. But while gold made the headlines, the dramatic fall in the sugar price was widely overlooked, despite closing down 4.4pc, compared with a 2.3pc slump in the price of bullion. Over the past year alone, sugar prices have fallen by a quarter. So why has everything turned sour? Bumper Harvest Monday's sharp price drop was driven by signs that Brazil, the world's biggest producer of sugar, is on...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

Last week I wrote a column on MarketWatch that seems to have stirred quite a bit of debate. Within the column, I was pointing to the potential for a multi-decade rally to be seen in the metals and mining stocks. It seems many of you had very strong feelings that this was simply not possible. Over the next few weeks, I will attempt to address the concerns many of you have presented in your comments to my piece.

The reason why Zero Hedge has been steadfast over the past 6 years in its accusation that the Fed is making a mockery of, and destroying not only the very fabric of capital markets (something which Citigroup now openly admits almost every week) but the US economy itself (as Goldman most recently hinted last week when it lowered its long-term "potential GDP" growth of the US by 0.5% to 1.75%), is simple: all along we knew we have been right, and all the career economists, Wall Street weathermen-cum-strategists, and "straight to CNBC" book-talking pundits were wrong. Not to mention the...

Venezuela's black market exchange rate weakened below a key level on Thursday, as the bolivar's decline steepened in the face of hyperinflation and a rapidly shrinking economy. Over the past couple of years the value of the currency has plummeted against the dollar to its present 300 bolivar level. In 2012, a dollar would get you 10 bolivars, according to unofficial exchange rates. By the time President Nicolas Maduro was inaugurated in April 2013, it was 24 bolivars to the dollar and by this January it was at 173. This black market rate of 300.72 on Thursday was almost 50...

So, beginning in [ARSH]sic 2008 when it became clear that the Constitutional Republic was in the process of being overthrown in a cold putsch, and then forward as I continued to blog here, I called a series of things, in no particular order, except for the last three, which are obviously end-game events, and thus placed at the end of the list: 1. Reformation of the Islamic Caliphate facilitated by the Washington DC regime 2. Total economic war executed by the Washington DC regime against the American people, specifically the Cloward-Piven Strategy, namely driving as many people as possible out...

Munger says prepare for harder world as buying power slides     | March 26, 2015 : 4:47 PM MYT    Share on facebook Share on twitter (Mar 26): Charles Munger, who became a billionaire while helping Warren Buffett build Berkshire Hathaway Inc., predicted it’s going to get tougher for consumers to maintain their standard of living in coming decades.“We should all be prepared for adjusting to a world that is harder,” Munger, 91, said Wednesday at an event in Los Angeles, in response to a question about the increase in the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet since...

Obamacare’s boosters have made so many implausible assertions about its supposed successes that it’s difficult to single out one as the most preposterous. But any list of their most comical claims would have to include those involving the law’s “wayback clause.” Haven’t heard of that one? Well, like the provision authorizing the IRS to issue subsidies via federal exchanges, it’s absent from PPACA’s text. Nonetheless, its efficacy is routinely touted by Obamacare’s proponents as proof that “reform” works. The most celebrated effect of this amazing provision is its retroactive reduction of medical inflation during the years preceding the law’s implementation....

~snip~ Germany was able to sell $3.72 billion of five-year bonds at a negative interest rate of .08%. In essence those who lent Germany this money were willing to pay the German government for the privilege of the government holding the investor’s funds for 5 years. The move reflects, in reality, that investors are more concerned about the return of principle than the return on principle. ~snip~ The disastrous consequences of the current economic policies allow negative interest rates to occur. Negative interest rates are a clear sign of an impending deflationary spiral. ~snip~ Just as the housing market and...

Very few people in America are willing to identify as upper class, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.About 94% of people in that income bracket (over $100,000) identified as middle class, upper middle class, or lower middle class while only 6% called themselves upper class.Here are the results of the survey:Pew Research Center While a family of three with an income of up to $122,000 is still considered "middle income," the over-$100,000 range also includes families with much higher salaries than that.Pew Research Center And although only 6% of survey respondents identified as upper class, Pew's data shows...

In 2006-2007 I called for a recession. We got a big one. I called for another one in 2011, as did the ECRI. That recession never happened. 50% is not a very good recession predicting track record except in comparison to consensus economic opinions that have never once in history predicted a recession. Consensus opinion is batting a perfect 0.00% Investigating the Record By the way, the ECRI was late in calling the recession of 2007. They still deny it. And questions regarding the 2001 recession and ECRI have still not been answered. I have talked about all of this...

EcoMatters February 26, 2015 CPI Core Shows Inflation The drop in energy prices, had the knee jerk reaction that we were in a deflationary spiral, again markets get many things wrong on first blush. The drop in energy prices is inflationary in the overall economy, and today`s CPI report showed what a sophisticated analysis would forecast regarding inflation and the role that low energy prices play in the overall inflation equation. We are going to have a transfer from the food and energy components which rely heavily on energy costs into the core inflation reading as consumers have more money...

How are the United States' historic budget deficits, money-printing and depressed economy any different from the country's that have experienced hyper-inflation? The three-part answer is:(1) we don't have any problems selling our debt(2) we aren't actually printing money; and (3) the United States is a highly productive economy that is nothing like bombed-out Budapest.

Mac Slavo February 19th, 2015It’s impossible to predict when and how our economy will finally reach a breaking point, but according to contrarian Shadow Stats economist John Williams it’s coming one way or the other. The only thing we can do now is to prepare for it and that means stockpiling critical supplies, just like you might for an earthquake or snowstorm, but in larger quantities. Because, if and when hyperinflation starts people will quickly realize that their dollars are worthless. And as we have seen time and again, and most recently in Russia, when a currency rapidly loses its...

It may be difficult to look beyond the current pricing environment for oil, but the depletion of low-cost reserves and the increasing inability to find major new discoveries ensures a future of expensive oil. While analyzing the short-term trajectory of oil prices is certainly important, it obscures the fact that over the long-term, oil exploration companies may struggle to bring new sources of supply online. Ed Crooks over at the FT persuasively summarizes the predicament. Crooks says that 2014 is shaping up to be the worst year in the last six decades in terms of new oil discoveries (based on...

Leika Kihara and Tetsushi Kajimoto, Reuters Februry 15, 2015 TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's economy rebounded from recession to grow an annualized 2.2 percent in the final quarter of last year, giving a much-needed boost to premier Shinzo Abe's efforts to shake off decades of stagnation even as the global outlook deteriorates. But the expansion was smaller than a 3.7 percent increase forecast in a Reuters poll, suggesting a fragile recovery for the world's third-largest economy as consumer mood remained soft and uneven global growth weighed on exports. Still, the return to growth will allow the Bank of Japan to hold...

Food prices are out of control in Russia. So now, Russian officials are even thinking about putting a price cap on "essential food products," reports the Moscow Times. "We will see how to efficiently place [the restrictions] into law," the deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich said. He also added that the government may give "the state competition watchdog more power in enforcing existing retail market regulations," reports the Moscow Times.