Wednesday, September 16, 2009

1.7% Inflation In August Due To Clunker Stupidity

Two weeks ago, my tractor broke.  It got fixed yesterday and  so I ran off this morning at sunrise to haul it home.  Then, I had to test all systems.  This meant using the backhoe for about 9 hours.  It was a long day and everything worked like a charm.  So here, very belatedly, is today’s story.  And of course, there are problems with our system.  The clunker deals whereby the US went deeper into debt to bankroll private purchases of cars, boosted the trade deficit, caused oil prices to rise and weakened the dollar.  Oops.  And this week, we are assured, there is no inflation.  HAHAHA.  In a rat’s ass.

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Producer Prices in U.S. Rise 1.7% in August as Gasoline Surges – Bloomberg.com

Wholesale prices in the U.S. rose more than twice as much as forecast in August, led by gasoline costs that have since partially receded.

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I have been around a long, long time. And I have a long, long memory. Always, in my life, when gasoline prices go up, the economy collapses. Rising gas prices is hell on our automobile-mad culture. When we have to spent money on energy, we can’t spend it on anything else. Besides that, the weak dollar also raised prices. For example, a sheet of the cheapest 4×8 chip board at Home Depot shot up in one week from $6.45 a sheet to $7.33 a sheet! This is due 100% to the dying dollar. Nothing else.

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The 1.7 percent increase in prices paid to factories, farmers and other producers was the fourth gain in five months and followed a 0.9 percent drop in July, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Excluding food and fuel, so-called core prices gained 0.2 percent, more than forecast.

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.Since we import a lot of the stuff we consume, the simple mechanism of killing the value of the dollar causes price hikes. End of story. This isn’t due to rising consumption but rather, the rising tide of dollars we spew out of the Federal Reserve and the free funny money for buying Japanese cars the Treasury handed out like candy on Halloween.

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Companies will have a hard time passing higher expenses onto customers until evidence that the economy is starting to recover translates into sustained gains in consumer spending and business investment. Economists predict inflation will stay under control, giving the Federal Reserve leeway to keep interest rates near zero for longer to spur growth.

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Good gods!  What ails everyone?  This Bloomberg analysis is totally whacked.  I see inflation all over the place.  Last time I took a customer to Home Depot to buy foreign products, EVERYTHING was up in price!  To the point of pure annoyance on my part.  This is the purest form of inflation: a weakening currency causing imports to suddenly hike in price.  This has actually been the US plan for dealing with trade deficits over the last 50 years: devalue the currency.  It doesn’t work, of course.  After a short bobble in trade numbers, the free trade guys get to work and things are pulled back deeper into the red than before.

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Below are some more Bloomberg News headlines:  Bernanke Says U.S. Recession `Very Likely’ Has Ended, Economy Still Weak—-Retail Sales in U.S. Jump 2.7%, Most in Three Years, Led by Auto Purchases–-how can ‘auto purchases’ be used as a scale of economic activity when this entire auto buying frenzy was 100% bankrolled by Uncle Sam?  Are all auto sales for the future be the same?  Instead, we had a stampede to buy new cars, the last thing the US needs since the majority of these purchases were foreign imports!  The US auto industry is still shutting down.  And this stupid clunker bill ended up causing our trade deficit to plunge much deeper in the red despite the weakening dollar.

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This is simple: the yen rose to around 90-92 to the dollar.  Normally, this would kill trade. But thanks to Uncle Sam bankrolling Japanese auto sales in the US, meant that the clunker deal totally undid the ‘good’ of the devaluing dollar!  So, we had a double deficit: our government spent yet another several billions trying to give the illusion of doing business and this increased our trade deficit!  And where do we borrow money?  Well, from the exporters our government is supporting with these clunker deals!

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U.S. trade association warns gov’t of protectionist perils_English_Xinhua

Protectionism would cause more trade disputes and drag the U.S. economy into peril, a U.S. industry association warned Monday following President Barack Obama’ s Friday decision to impose punitive tariffs on tires imported from China. .

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“With the U.S. economy on the verge of recovery, we strongly urge our leadership to follow through on G8 commitments to not erect protectionist barriers that would open the door for larger trade frictions and, more importantly, put our economic recovery in peril,” American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) President and CEO Kevin M. Burke said in a statement released Monday. .

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The AAFA is the U.S. national trade association representing apparel, footwear and other sewn products companies and their suppliers, which compete in the global market.

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The US no longer makes clothes for either export or internal consumption.  This is the fate of nearly all our industries.  The US is the world’s #1 military equipment export power, on the other hand.  So our military, that is supposed to protect us, makes money to try to balance our trade woes by selling weapons to all our trade rivals and others.  This doesn’t make the US one bit safer over the long or short run.  Since all our trade associations are now FOREIGN AGENTS pushing to have us sell weapons or import all our manufactured goods, we should have them registered at this.  Not be treated as ‘American’ organizations.  Like AIPAC, they are aliens and should be treated as such.

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Incidentally, Obama and Mitchell are in full retreat in the Middle East as Congress, AIPAC and the Israeli overlords stomp both men into the ground.  Forget the GOP Congressman calling out, ‘Liar’ to Obama.  The Israeli PM calls him every name in the book and doesn’t have to even apologize.

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BBC NEWS | South Asia | India is ‘losing Maoist battle’

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says his country is losing the battle against Maoist rebels. Mr Singh told a meeting of police chiefs from different states that rebel violence was increasing and the Maoists’ appeal was growing.

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The rebels say they are fighting for the rights of the poor. They operate in a large swathe of territory across central India, and in some areas have almost replaced the local government. More than 6,000 people have been killed during their 20-year fight for a communist state.

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It looks like India will finally have a revolution.  The country will stay mired in a very noxious social system unless India has a full revolution.  Most every country that has shot forwards in industrialization and other areas like the sciences, etc, first has to have a social revolution to throw off the shackles of religious dogmas.  India has a very nasty social system that confines people into various castes and it is very brutal and way overdue for change.  China is finally emerging from its revolutionary bloodbath and got a new start on life thanks to the upheavals that overthrew a very powerful and ancient status quo system.

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Ditto for India: its status quo goes back in time by thousands of years and is immensely unfair.  There are readers here at my blog who hate social or government systems and imagine they should be simple individuals.  Well, I know of virtually no systems that are run this way.  We can’t be just whatever we want, we have to create systems that have many connections, the more, the better.  This is called ‘civilization’.  India is one of the main centers of the creation of ‘civilizations’ that is, the building of cities.

The Euphrates river valleys, the Nile and the big rivers in Asia are all early civilization centers and all of them have fallen into stagnation and fell behind the former barbarian sectors like Europe or the modern ones like the US empire.  The weight of the past can stifle as well as instruct.  This is why the revolutionary radicals who founded the US decided to enshrine in the Constitution two utterly different things: the separation of Church and State so the US would not become like India, and the 3/5th vote for each slave owned by mostly Southerners.

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African slaves were turned into ‘untouchables.’  And this has troubled our nation to this day.  Learning to overcome this is tremendously difficult for us.  So, in India, overturning the social system of semi-slavery of the untouchables will be equally hard.  And India, like the US,will not get very far unless this is done.

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Rockefeller Chief McDonald Dies in Apparent Suicide (Update1) – Bloomberg.com

-James McDonald, chief executive officer of New York investment firm Rockefeller & Co., died Sunday from a single gunshot wound that was probably self- inflicted, officials in Massachusetts said….

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…McDonald was appointed to CIT Group Inc.’s board of directors in October 2007 and retired from the money-losing lender in May, two months before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. refused to guarantee the company’s debt, driving it toward a possible bankruptcy.

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I suspect this death will lead to more news.  I wonder what stupid schemes troubled this guy so much, he had to end it all?  He was younger than I.  He was much, much, much richer than I.  Or at least, a lot of loot passed through his hands before he finally signed up to join the entities who live in the Cave of Wealth and Death.

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Stiglitz Says Banking Problems Are Now Bigger Than Pre-Lehman – Bloomberg.com

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

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“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

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Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

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Stiglitz is 100% correct.  The biggest guys are bigger.  Like with the clunker deal, this was 100% thanks to Uncle Sam bailing them out.   Paulson hasn’t blown his own brains out, he is trying to make up for losing 2 years of profits now that he has a firm grip on our financial system.  Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are bigger than ever and so is the Derivatives Beast.  Even talking about putting that immense monster under control has these gnomes howling with rage.  It is their main and in some cases, only money maker right now.

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As for the last sentence: talk about CHUTZPAH!  The Bank of Israel is a total leech on our system.  If the Zionists want things to not grow ‘excessively’ I would suggest the US government save us immense sums of money and cut Israel off from our finances.  This tiny country is a #1 leech on our systems.  And we should flee Afghanistan.  Let the Chinese or the Russians deal with it.  Except Russia probably has decided this is too dangerous.  So let the Chinese take over.  This would be more fun than a trade war!

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