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Inflation in One Page


Curmudgeon's      Commentary Archive

Money Magic
Twittering to Death
Posterity's Debt To Me
Butchers, Bankers, Cong
.
The Battle for Honest Money
Coping with Deflation
From Riches to Rags
Fiddler's Broken Wrist
Jack-lantern Wealth
Gold Confiscation
Look Out Below!
Voting for Maggie
1932
Poobahs of Positivism
A Wistful Vista

1948
An Unknown Road
Vern's Precipitation
IOU-nothing
Blood In the Streets
How To Buy Gold
Natalie's Predicament
America Descending
Just Plain Stealing?
A thing to fear
Unstuffing a Lifetime
Heavenly Sex
FDR & History
Chicken Little Convention  
Lead us not into temptation
My Obituary
 Legislature and Embryos
  
Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive
What Fools, We Mortals
Unvarnished Truth

End-of-everything Blues
My Immigrant Relative
The Eloquent Pogo
Nesta's Complaint
Unionize School Children
Hucksterism Gone Wild
Unmanageable Religion

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May 18, 2012

It is not going well in Europe.
A fiscal frenzy in Spain adds to the worry.

    "The Spanish banking sector is a particular source of alarm. Analysts estimate the nation's lenders could be sitting on unrecognized bad property loans of up to €100bn. The Spanish government last week unveiled a plan to require its banks to put aside an extra €30bn against future possible losses and announced an independent audit of its lenders' balance sheets. But that was seen as inadequate to restore confidence." Europe Rocked By Crisis

    Tiresome.  Every day we get an earful of bad monetary news from across the Atlantic.  One weary commentator said he wished Greece and Spain would sink into the ocean.  

    That won't happen, of course, but there's a distinct possibility the strain on the euro will be too great and we'll see several Eurozone nations break away to revive their own national currencies.  Seems like a giant step backwards, but history is riddled with reversals.  


FACEBOOK?  NO THANKS. 

   We personally don't need Facebook. We're getting along just fine without it. We wouldn't put money into the highly touted public stock offering because a/ the public is fickle and can tire of time-wasters like Facebook and Twitter.. b/ The Facebook bubble can pop at any time, ala the Dot.Com bubble of several years ago. 

    We'll stick with our comments of January, 2011.  Twittering Ourselves to Death. 

  But here's something we'd sink some money into, if we had the wherewithal.  It's Google's suddenly famous driverless car.  

   Here's a vehicle with no driver negotiating the busy streets.  A laser atop the car, plus a sophisticated computer, handles it all.  Just think what a boon that would be to those among us who can't drive because of bad vision or other handicap!  We could just hop in our driverless car and be taken to our destination. 

                          Driverless Car


A bumper sticker to remind us of economic basics:

Deflation = stronger dollar, declining prices.
Inflation = weaker dollar, rising prices. 

   "Issuing debt and printing money do not create wealth. All they can create is a temporary illusion of wealth."

   "Uh-oh, here he goes again with one of those boring lectures about money."

   Well, the quality of dollars, euros, yuan, pounds, and other world currencies occupy a lot of space in the news these days, so it may not hurt to try to get a handle on what's going on.  Charles Hugh Smith wrote a longish ramble on the subject last month. There are some nuggets in it worth thinking about.   What Happens When All The Money Vanishes?



  "There really isn't a policy for the Fed to follow now that can contribute to strength of the economy."  ~Harvard Professor Martin Feldstein. Martin Feldstein is no amateur economist.  He was around in the 1970s when Fed Chief Arthur Burns could not get the economy to respond to the manipulations of the Federal Reserve's money policies.  That's when the expression "pushing on a string" came into use.   
  
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