New York Fed chief Bill Dudley is just an iPutz (When was the last time he went grocery shopping?)

New York Post ^ | 03/22/2011 | John Crudele

[SeekAndFind]

The head of the New York Federal Reserve was trying to persuade a group of Queens citizens recently that inflation was under control. So he explained that every generation of Apple's iPad was getting more powerful per dollar than the previous one.

That keeps inflation in check, Dudley was trying to say, although he didn't explain this preposterous theory as well as I just did.

Someone in the audience astutely asked, "When was the last time, sir, that you went grocery shopping?" The person who spoke up was trying to make Dudley realize that no matter how tasty iPads might be to technophiles, you can't eat the damn things.

And had the guy from the crowd continued he might have pointed out that food, oil, gas, education, insurance, clothing, medicine -- need I continue with this list? -- are just some of the things that are really crimping the family budget nowadays.

Dudley, you need to know, is a trained economist. In fact, before he decided to slum it as New York Fed chief, Dudley was the very well-paid employee of Goldman Sachs.

It's important to know Dudley's background because economists don't think like you and me. And rich economists, especially, don't look at price changes like the regular folks who have to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets for the necessities of life.

I assume Dudley has no trouble paying his bills. But that isn't why he's out of touch with inflation reality. For that you can blame something called "hedonics," which I've written about often in this column, although not recently.

Like long robes and mortarboards with tassels, hedonics is something that should be confined to campuses and not allowed into the real world. Desperate politicians have long used this harebrained theory to make inflation magically disappear.

[org.whodat]

Then Dudley and the Fed proclaimed, “let them eat cake,” and so let it be written, and so let it be done. Now where is that damn Fiddle.

[GailA]

This generation had better learn how to grow it’s own food, and stop relying on the grocery/drug stores for 100% of the items they need. Then learn the art of using COUPONS.

PJ-Comix can teach you all how to do it. I came out of the grocery store yesterday with a $52 bill....which before coupons was $85. That savings then paid for my tank of gas @ $3.19, as I’d earned enough Kroger points to get 10 a gal off.

[The_Reader_David]

The stupidity of Dudley’s remark is inexcusable even if he indeed never shops for himself and really views the economy as a purely academic exercise. Surely he has at his disposal solid statistics on the composition of the typical household’s spending and knows that spending on technology subject to Moore’s law is a very small portion of the budget compared to food, energy (motor fuel, home heating and power for the gadgets whose effective price decline he touts) and housing.

If he want to factor increased power at the same price into inflation in technology, he and the Fed had better be considering the “grocery shrink-ray” as some wag christened the 14.5 oz. can of vegetables for the same price as the old 15 oz. or the 14 oz. package of shrimp for the same price a pound of shrimp used to cost in considering food inflation.

[updatedscreenname]

When will the indicator on the BS meter fall off?
Need to get a faster connection to keep up with all of this administrations lies!

No fly zone (attack with bombers and missiles)

Jet Crashed due to mechanical failure (shot down)

Inflation under control (oil and other commodities setting new highs)

[Buckeye McFrog]

you can be sure that if he were a GOP Presidential hopeful, no fewer than 175 MSM reporters would have asked him that by now