President Joe Biden’s “build back better” spending bill seems to be dead — at least for the time being. But there is still plenty of spending coming down the pike. This raises an important question: how is the Federal Reserve going to simultaneously taper its bond-buying program and monetize all of this debt?
On Monday, President Joe Biden signed a massive military spending bill into law.
I’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news is you probably put a little more money in your pocket in November.
The bad news is inflation ate up all your income gains and then some.
Real personal incomes fell 0.2% in November despite a healthy gain in nominal income.
Gold closed out the week before Christmas above $1,800 an ounce, despite rising bond yields. The $1,800 level has been viewed as a ceiling for the price of gold. In his podcast, Peter Schiff said people need to start thinking of $1,800 as a floor. And he said they will once they realize there is no ceiling on inflation.
With the “transitory” inflation narrative dead and buried, the powers that be have shifted to a new tactic to deflect their responsibility for rising prices – blame somebody else.
Elizabeth Warren recently claimed that rising prices were due to “price gouging” by “greedy” corporations. But the evidence says otherwise. In fact, producer prices have risen faster than consumer prices. That means businesses have only passed on some of their higher costs to consumers. If anything these “greedy” corporations have allowed consumers to gouge them.
Are we heading toward a Fed policy that fixes inflation at a permanent rate of five to six percent?
We could be.
But inflation is a policy that cannot last.
Peter Schiff appeared on Judging Freedom with Judge Napolitano to talk about inflation.
Why are we suffering from it? Who’s to blame? And where is this leading?
Labor market productivity has been dropping for decades. And you can trace the plunge back to the demise of the gold standard.
US labor market productivity plummeted in the third quarter of 2021. Revisions to the data showed a 5.2% drop in productivity, even worse than the dismal initial reading last month. It was the worst productivity decline since 1960.
Last week, the Fed sped up its timetable for tapering its asset purchases and raising interest rates. While this represents a slightly tighter monetary policy, it’s far from truly tight. And yet, the central bankers at the Fed and a lot of people in the mainstream seem to think these small steps will tame the inflation dragon. In fact, this slight tightening is a little like taking a pea shooter to a bazooka fight.
Despite finally acknowledging inflation will likely runner hotter and last longer than expected, there is still widespread belief that it is transitory in the long run. After all, we had a couple of decades of tame inflation, and that’s now viewed as the norm. In this podcast, Peter Schiff explains why the only thing that’s transitory is the era of low inflation.
We got more bad inflation news this week as the Federal Reserve wrapped up its final FOMC meeting of the year. Supposedly, the central bank has launched its war on inflation. Has it though? In this episode of the Friday Gold Wrap podcast, host Mike Maharrey talks about inflation and the Fed meeting and explains why it looks more like the Fed is taking a pea shooter into a bazooka fight.
In October, retail sales surged much higher than expected, rising 1.7%. The mainstream gushed over retail spending, asserting that it was a sign that the economy is booming. At the time, I argued that it wasn’t necessarily good news.
Well, the news just got even worse. Retail sales in November disappointed, despite another big surge in inflation.
