SilverBoat
Posts: 257
Joined: 7/26/2006 Status: offline
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Hrmm ... ... Maybe somebody should note the date, but I agree with much of what both DomKen and RealOne posted, and I'd take issue with the video-prof's definition of "inflation" ... DK & RO (and Mn and others too) posted some very valid points: as the number of persons, goods, services, etc in the total economy increases, if the total money supply (as measured by issuance, velocity, etc) remains static, in general each of those persons, goods, services, etc would be forced by their relative demands and supplies to transact at lower fractions of the total. The example of adding 1 new worker's output (and wages) to the existing 10's economy is a classic, and valid example. Presume, for the sake of example, that the 10 workers produced 100 different items, but due to invention started producing 101, all of equal demand. With only X amount of wages available, the price for everything else produced would drop 1% (actually 1.00110011%...) Those are valid perspectives, regardless of all the specious garbage bickered around them by legions of irate academic idjiots whose careers depend on out-cult-of-personalitying their peers. And yeah, the various analytics of accumulations, velocities, etc also have some validity, because the real economy and finance are much too complex and too rapidly varying to assess using the counts of workers, goods, etc. (And that's far too many etcs, but I'm just in that sort of mood, etc ... lol) Anyway, the costs of generic things, such as foods, fuels, clothing, housing and so forth *have* been rising, even as measured as relative fractions of mean wages, because the fraction of 'wages' (which includes 'profits') that gets diverted into paper pyramids of speculative 'securities' contracts, resource controls, and other non-productive parasitic ventures has increased. For every $100 of tangible goods and services produced (in the industrialized nations), roughly $20 is extracted as 'profit' by the 'financial' entities who bought the stock, made the loans, gilded the CEOs, and roll that back into leveraged buyouts of each other, pump-n-dumping commodity futures, imploding bundled mortgage tranches, etc. That's why you, Mr. J.Q.Bottom90%, only have $80 to buy today what your daddy's generation had $95. And if the abuse of that diversion wasn't bad enough (and so grotesquely profitable enough that it's been bribed into legal subsidy via 'gains-exemptions'), the banking managers who control large retirement funds are screwing the millions of small investors with leverage on the investors' own deposits. Those managers can borrow from the Fed, at 0.25%, charge you at least 3.25% for a mortgage, 25% for revolving credit, and play lunatic market games at 2500% (for a 4% cash reserve requirement) with your minimum-free-checking account balance. ... Inflation, at the work-a-day consumers' level of prices rising faster than wages definition, is occurring because so much of the money supply has been hijacked by political bribery into the 'financial' systems' extortion. (Remember "too big to fail"?) ... Changing that, I dunno, might not be possible. They've bought up control of all the major media systems too.
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