QE2 was supposed to end, and it has. However, as it ends, the federal reserve opens up open ended dollar lending to foreign central banks. Supposedly there is no risk, since these are central banks, and we all know central banks always repay their debts.
A little of the violence is real, indeed more and more of it is real, but the vast majority of it is still imitation violence by astroturf, which I conjecture is imitation riot theater instigated by the government against itself to dramatize its imitation austerity theater.
Observe the trash fires at 0:14. Real rioters burn stuff more valuable than trash, and light bigger fires.
Observe at 0:24 the group of protestors armed with white sticks, all the sticks identical, and all rather small and light, suitable perhaps for disciplining a woman or a small boy, but definitely not the sort of thing that one should strike a man with, particularly a man wearing armor. That the sticks are light, indicates pretend violence. That the sticks are identical, indicates astroturf. Someone has got in a big batch of mass produced sticks, and handed them out. The sticks are white, for maximum visibility, to make a good image, rather than to shatter the bones of one’s enemies.
At 0:51 , observe some real violence – directed, of course, at a non state enemy.
At 1:06, observe the police detonate a noisy teargas canister a couple of feet downwind of their own feet, rather than at the protestors. Similarly at 1:16, where the police are almost teargassing themselves.
At 1:42 observe a little petrol unsurprisingly fail to set a stone building on fire – someone has thrown a tiny little molotov at a target that it cannot possibly harm. Indeed, places where it is so obviously safe to place a molotov are few and far between. Someone set this molotov for the least possible risk of damage.
At 2:10, another white stick, absolutely identical to every other white stick we saw in the video. The whole riot evidently has a single weapons supplier, a strong indication that this is an astroturf rent-a-mob riot. Observe the way he is carrying the stick, revealing how light it is.
“You can’t trust bankers” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”
Taleb is an econometrician and trader – meaning he makes his money betting on financial instruments, like a professional poker player. (more…)
There is precision, and there is accuracy. It is unwise to attain more precision than accuracy, for one is apt to fool oneself, and worse still to attain precision at the cost of accuracy.
You cannot measure inflation on goods that are changing, without making questionable subjective judgements. Goods that are not changing are stuff like food and fuel. An accurate measure of inflation would not include goods that apt to change, which measure would understate the difficult to define or measure improvement of standard living, but accurately state the cost of living.
So how is inflation going on stuff that we can measure accurately?
It is starting to look a lot like hyperinflation:
(more…)
The billion prices project spiders prices off the internet, and gets results broadly similar to the BLS, about thee percent per year, which surprises me, since over the last three years the BLS has been applying “hedonic adjustments” to all manner of goods where hedonic adjustment is impossible or implausible. Today’s supposedly three percent inflation as measured by the BLS is a lot higher rate of inflation than what the BLS was measuring as three percent inflation three years ago.
If stimulus works, if Keynesianism is a good enough approximation to the modern American economy, there should be a relationship between unemployment and inflation, the Philips curve. Higher unemployment should lead to lower inflation, and vice versa.
There is no relationship.
Philips curve
House Republican leader McConnell tells Obama he can stick it into the Republicans just a little bit, but not all the way, and must stop if it starts to hurt. (more…)
Last year the riots were entirely fake, astroturf government rioters theatrically engaging in pretend conflict with government police. This time, there was some fake violence, and some quite real violence. (more…)
I observe that people are still buying and selling long term corporate bonds at prices that indicate low inflationary expectations.
On the other hand, total value of world gold is about fifteen trillion dollars, which indicates a lot of people expecting partial or total collapse of fiat money (more…)