No Matter How Bad You Think It Is: It Really Is Worse

The pain of the ongoing financial and economic crisis is far more widely distributed across the US than is generally known. Certainly neither the US government nor the popular media are helping to make the situation clear. No doubt they have reasons of their own for their reticence. But anyone who wants to look into the future over just a small distance, needs to have a fairly clear idea of the present and recent past.

"If unemployment was computed the way BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] did it prior to 1994," the true unemployment rate in the United States "would be 22.2%".

And while the prospect of more than a fifth of the workforce being idle is scary enough, inflation in consumer prices is even scarier, particularly to the aforementioned one-in-five unemployed. And unemployed or their plight as concerns dealing with inflation in prices, he says, "In current economic analysis, inflation is largely in the eye of the beholder, and depending on how you choose to look, very different stories emerge."

This is where I thought he would mention the unemployed, or the poor, and their harrowing experiences in paying higher prices without any income, but he doesn't.

He says, instead, that it is all worse than I think, thanks to the way the American government calculates inflation. "In the US," he says, "food and beverages count for just 16.4% of the CPI [Consumer Price Index] calculation. The Chinese apparently believe that the basic necessities of life should count for more, assigning a 33% weight to the nutritional components. These differences in measurement are partially responsible for the divergent inflation climate in both countries, and make most people believe that inflation is fickle and localized."

It is not, and Mr Pento agrees, saying, almost poetically, "From my perspective, inflation is a global wave that will ultimately swamp all shores." _ATimes

Most of the financial disaster of 2008 was triggered by US government policies which forced financial institutions to make bad loans. Unfortunately, the financial institutions then tried to be clever, and built an international financial empire of risk upon these bad loans -- leveraging them to the hilt. Rating agencies failed to grasp the high-risk nature of these clever financial instruments -- "worth" many $trillions.

The disaster that followed should not have been such a surprise to anyone paying attention -- both of them. But every governmental and inter-governmental agency appears bent on 2 things: Covering up their role in what happened, AND re-inflating the bubble all over again. (Among other horrendously ludicrous mis-steps which will be covered later)

In other words, the world's economic fate sits in the hands of idiots, fools, and criminals -- big surprise!

What do you do about it, in the middle of a growing Idiocracy?