In This Issue: How do You Spell Stagflation? Cooking the Inflation Books Gaming the Producer Price Index Consumer Spending is Up, but then Again, It May Be Down A Two Dimensional Problem Saudi Justice New York, Toronto, Europe and Thanksgiving This week we look at inflation. Is it just over 2%, giving...
Sea Change at the Fed "Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange" (The Tempest - Shakespeare) The term "sea change" has come to mean a profound transformation ever since...
The Mortgage Pig in the Python Inflation is Baked into the CPI Numbers The Mortgage Pig in the Python Housing Starts Look to Stop A Few Thoughts on the Recent Credit Crisis Half of All Hedge Funds Gone? Golf, Weddings, and Europe With the economy increasingly looking like it will slow down materially...
Introduction This week in Outside the Box we look at a Congressional Budget Office publication that dives us the details on how the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) is created. This is, as the CBO posits, the best-known official measure of inflation. The brief that follows will venture...
Introduction This week we look at something which has far more potential to hurt the economy than subprime loans - the US Congress. We muse on inflation data and why the economy may do better than I think. But first, and quickly, my young assistant Micah Davis is leaving soon to go full time in an entrepreneurial...
Introduction It's been a random walk through the data fields this week. The headlines say that inflation rose a mere 0.1% in August. The markets liked that. But digging deeper, the data is not as sanguine. We had the depressing Philly Fed manufacturing index last week, but today we find that Chicago...
Introduction Is the Fed right to be worried about inflation, or is that so last quarter? What do musty old academic papers suggest about Fed policy? And can we translate that into something that gives us a clue as to why markets around the world are in seeming lockstep on their way to the exits? (Quick...
Introduction How can inflation be so low over the past few years if we see rising energy prices, ever-increasing medical costs and especially the cost of housing rising so dramatically? Today, for the first time we see inflation actually showing the results of rising energy costs, and the number is ugly...