Steve Bull's Blog, page 84
December 17, 2023
Rickards’ Five 2024 Forecasts
Rickards’ Five 2024 Forecasts
I have five forecasts for 2024 to help keep you ahead of the curve in positioning your investment portfolio.
My overall forecast is that 2024 will be more tumultuous and shocking than 2023. That may seem hard to credit.
With two major wars going on, an indicted former president and a demented current president, how can 2024 be more challenging than 2023?
Rest assured; it will be. I explain why below.
An Election of Dire Consequences
It’s a cliche to write that the next presidential election will be the “most important in our lifetimes.” Yet in 2024 that cliche will actually be true.
The divide between the two parties is probably greater than at any time in U.S. political history since the Civil War. The choice could not be more stark and the stakes could not be higher.
That’s why this election is so important.
First off, I don’t think that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president.
Biden’s problem is not just his age, but the fact that he actually is mentally and physically impaired. He’s simply not fit to be president, and everyone knows it even if Democratic operatives and media sycophants don’t want to mention it. But who will replace Biden?
The most likely replacements are Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer and Jennifer Granholm. All four were or are state governors. They’re all about the same ideologically; take your pick. Forget Kamala Harris; she’s simply too much of a liability.
The Republican Side
On the Republican side, there’s not a lot to say. Trump will be the nominee; no one can recall a non-incumbent with such a large lead in the polls.
He’s leading the pack by 55 points or more and is now even running ahead of Joe Biden in recent polls.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
December 16, 2023
Intentional Destruction
First Covid, Now Comes “The Great Taking”
The Great Depression was a well-executed plan to seize assets, impoverish the population, and remake society. What comes next is worse..
A recent book by David Webb sheds new light on exactly what happened during the Great Depression. In Webb’s view, it was a set up.
Webb is a successful former investment banker and hedge fund manager with experience at the highest levels of the financial system. He published The Great Taking a few months ago, and recently supplemented it with a video documentary. Thorough, concise, comprehensible and FREE. Why? Because he wants everyone to understand what’s being done.
The Great Taking describes the roadmap to collapse the system, suppress the people, and seize all your assets. And it includes the receipts.
You Already Own Nothing
Webb’s book illustrates, among other things, how changes in the Uniform Commercial Code converted asset ownership into a security entitlement. The “entitlement” designation made personal property a mere contractual claim. The “entitled” person is a “beneficial” owner, but not the legal one.
In the event a financial institution is insolvent, the legal owner is the “entity that controls the security with a security interest.” In essence, client assets belong to the banks. But it’s much worse than that. This isn’t simply a matter of losing your cash to a bank bail-in. The entire financial system has been wired for a controlled demolition.
Webb describes in detail how the trap was set, and how the Great Depression provides precedent. In 1933, FDR declared a “Bank Holiday.” By executive order, banks were closed. Later, only those approved by the Fed were allowed to reopen.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Israel, Gaza, and the Struggle for Oil
Aerial View of Haifa oil refineries. Photo: Meronim, CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed.
It was the sign that got to me. I was standing with protesters outside the Burlington (VT) City Hall at a rally organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. To my left I spotted a man, grim-faced and silent, holding aloft a piece of cardboard with these words scratched in black:
“Jews against Genocide.”
“So it has finally come to this,” I said to myself.
Why, I wondered, would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Biden administration risk their standing in the world and ignore calls for a ceasefire? Did they have an unspoken agenda?
As a chronicler of the endless post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, I concluded that the end game was likely connected to oil and natural gas, discovered off the coast of Gaza, Israel and Lebanon in 2000 and 2010 and estimated to be worth $500 billion. The discovery promised to fuel massive development schemes involving the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
Also at stake was the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean into a heavily militarized energy corridor that could supply Europe with its energy needs as the war in Ukraine dragged on.
Here was the tinderbox waiting to explode that I had predicted in 2022. Now it was exploding before our very eyes. And at what cost in human lives?
Map of the Eastern Mediterranean region showing the area included in the USGS Levant Basin Province assessment. Photo credit: USGS.
Reflections on the Israeli War on Gaza
The year 1975 was my last in beautiful, cosmopolitan Beirut, Lebanon, before it descended into 15 years of brutal civil war, killing 100,000 people.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
December 15, 2023
Ten Things that Change without Fossil Fuels
It is now popular to talk about leaving fossil fuels to prevent climate change. Pretty much the same result occurs if we run short of fossil fuels: We lose fossil fuels, but it is because we cannot extract them. Practically no one tells us about the extent to which the current system depends upon fossil fuels, however.
The economy is extraordinarily dependent on fossil fuels. If there are not enough fossil fuels to go around, there is likely to be fighting over what is available. Some countries are likely to get far more than their fair share, while the rest of the world’s population will be left with very little or no fossil fuels.
If losing fossil fuels completely, or nearly completely, is a risk for some of the world’s population, it might be useful to think through some of the things that go wrong. The following are some of my ideas about things that change, mostly for the worse, in a fossil fuel-deprived economy.
[1] Banks, as we know them, will likely fail.
Before banks fail in areas with virtually no fossil fuels, my guess is that we will generally see hyperinflation. Governments will greatly increase the money supply in a vain attempt to get people to believe that more goods and services are being produced. This approach will be used because people equate having more money with the ability to buy more goods and services. Unfortunately, without fossil fuels it will be very difficult to produce very many goods.
More money will simply provide more inflation because it takes physical resources, including the proper types of energy, to operate machinery of all kinds to make goods. Creating services also requires fossil fuel energy, but generally, to a lesser extent than creating goods…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Money for Nothing and Nothing for Money
Remember, you are a sovereign individual and the blob in our nation’s capital city is an undifferentiated mass of feckless protoplasm. You contain a cosmos of ideas and aspirations. The blob is an agglomeration of sham and failure. The blob stands for itself, not for our country. You and I can stand for our country.
Remember, also, that the economy of our country at its best was the sum of choices made by sovereign individuals, while the economy of the blob is a gelatinous buildup of unsound hypotheses having nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness. We sense this in the menacing rumors of a Federal Reserve digital currency, which entails the rehypothecation of our hopes and dreams into the blob’s waste-stream, turning everything we do — it can’t be put delicately — into shit.
The Fed digital currency will be used to cover-up the failure of end-state financialization of the economy. Finance, you understand, used to be a module of the economy, with a particular role to play. The purpose of finance, formerly, was to marshal surplus wealth from prior productive activity to make new productive activity possible. Financialization, however, does not do that. Financialization was an effort to replace the economy of real production with a hologram of production. Financialization is a racket — and a racket, remember, is an effort to get something for nothing, that is, dishonestly. The blob feeds and thrives on dishonesty, its favorite food.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
December 14, 2023
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVIII–The ‘Predicament’ of Ecological Overshoot
January 25, 2022
Tulum, Mexico (1986) Photo by authorThe ‘Predicament’ of Ecological Overshoot
The following contemplation has been prompted by some commentary regarding a recent article by Megan Seibert of the Real Green New Deal Project. It pulls together a couple of threads that I’ve been discussing the past few months…
There is no ‘remedy’ for our predicament of ecological overshoot, at least not one that most of us would like to implement. While it would be nice to have a ‘solution’, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner from which there appears to be no ‘escape’ — for a variety of reasons.
Most people don’t want to contemplate such an inevitability but the writing seems to be pretty clearly on the wall: we have ‘blossomed’ as a species in both numbers and living standards almost exclusively because of the exploitation of a one-time, finite cache of an energy-rich resource that has encountered significant diminishing returns but whose extraction and secondary impacts have led to pronounced and irreversible (at least in human lifespan terms) environmental/ecological destruction; this expansion of homo sapiens has blown well past the natural carrying capacity of our planetary environment and like any other species that experiences this the future can only be one of a massive ‘collapse’ — both in population numbers and sociocultural complexities.
Also like every other animal on this planet, we are hard-wired to avoid pain and seek out pleasure. But unlike other species we have a unique tool-making ability that we can use to help us address this genetic predisposition. So instead of accepting our painful plight and because of our complex cognitive abilities we have crafted a variety of pleasurable narratives to help us deny the impending reality — few of us ‘enjoy’ contemplating our mortality, so we avoid it or create comforting stories to soothe our anxieties and reduce our cognitive dissonance (an afterlife of some kind being one of the most common).
Throw on top of this the propensity for those at the top of our complex social structures to leverage crises to meet their primary motivation (control/expansion of the wealth-generation/extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and positions of ‘power’), and we have the perfect storm of circumstances to craft soothing stories of ‘solutions’ — especially through industrial production of ‘green/clean’ energy.
Conveniently left out of these tales (through both omission and commission) are the ‘costs’ of these ‘remedies’:
1) The actual unsustainability of industrial products dependent upon finite resources, including the fossil fuel platform.
2) The environmentally-/ecologically-destructive extraction and production processes required to construct, maintain, and then dispose of these ‘clean’ products.
3) The impossibility of any proposed energy alternative to fossil fuels to support our current energy-intensive complexities.
4) The social injustices being foisted upon peoples in the regions being exploited for many of the resources required for ‘green’ products.
5) The geopolitical chess games being played primarily over control of the resources — and the very real possibility of large-scale wars because of these.
6) The highlighting of immediately perceived benefits but the hiding of externalised negative consequences (that is made easier because of temporal lags in some of the effects).
Our propensity for ‘trusting’ authority combines with our desire to deny negative outcomes and leads the vast majority of people to believe that the oxymoronic solution of ‘green’ energy is real and achievable. Not only can we overcome the unfortunate consequences of our growth, but we can transition and sustain, no, improve, our standards of living if only we pursue with all our resources (both physical and monetary) the production of technologies cheered on by our ‘leaders’ — who just happen to profit handsomely from this. All it takes is belief…and, of course, the funnelling of LOTS of fiat currency into the hands of the ruling class.
Adding to the complexity of all of this, we walking/talking apes are highly emotional beings and loss impacts us significantly. We go through a rather complicated grieving process to come to grips with the negative emotions that accompany loss. The increasing recognition that we exist on a finite planet with finite resources and that we have reached or surpassed a tipping point in what we can ‘sustain’ of our social and physical complexities brings significant grief — few want the good times or conveniences to ever end. We experience a variety of stages in coming to accept our loss. Psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first proposed a five-stage process for this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Most people, I would argue, are in one of the first three stages at this particular juncture of time. Many are still in complete denial. They continue to believe that things will work out just fine and that the Cassandras shouting about the apocalypse are just plain ‘kooky’. There are some who are indeed quite angry and they are protesting and demanding that our political systems address our issues. They are pushing back hard against the status quo systems, upset that they have been misled on many fronts. Then there are those who are bargaining hard and clinging to the idea that we can ‘tweak’ our current systems or find some ‘solution’, especially through the use of our technological prowess and resourcefulness.
Then there are those few who have moved into the acceptance stage. They recognise what has happened and what will happen. They have acknowledged the inevitability that the complex systems that we rely upon are well beyond our capacity to alter, except perhaps at the margins.
This is not to say those who have reached the acceptance stage have completely ‘given up’, which is an accusation often hurled by those in the earlier stages of grief — and usually along with a LOT of ad hominem attacks. Indeed those who I know accept our predicament are still ‘fighting’, as it were. They are attempting to: alert/inform others so as to not make our situation ever worse (which is exactly what technological ‘solutions’ do); pursuing marginal changes such as increasing the self-reliance/-sufficiency of local regions by advocating relocalisation and regenerative agriculture/permaculture, and/or advocating degrowth; and/or seeking solace through faith of some kind.
No one, not one of us gets out of here alive. Whether some of us or our descendants make it out the other side of the bottleneck we have created for ourselves is up in the air. I wish the stories that have been weaved about ‘renewables’ and the future they could provide were true but I’ve come to the realisation that the more we do to try and prolong our current energy-intensive complexities, the more we reduce the chances for any of us, including most other species (at least those that we haven’t already exterminated), to have much if any of a future.
A couple of relevant articles/links in no particular order of importance:
The Seneca EffectA blog by Ugo Bardi . It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should…thesenecaeffect.blogspot.comRenewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity – Nature Communications
Renewable energy production is necessary to mitigate climate change, however, generating the required technologies and…www.nature.comKevin Hester
“Changes will happen decades earlier than previously thought.” Now where have we heard that before? “More rain than…kevinhester.liveDon’t Make Me Watch:
The new climate film celebrates malpractice martyrdom, and enviros of all stripes are cheering it onmedium.comProblems, Predicaments, and Technology
Recently, I have come across literally hundreds of people defending EVs, their batteries, and electricity generation of…problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.comThrough the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition
We add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition…www.mdpi.comDamn the Matrix
Or why the world is going to helldamnthematrix.wordpress.comNet zero policies are ’emperor’s new clothes,’ academics warn
Net zero targets are a “fantasy” that often just protect “business as usual,” a leading expert in environment and…phys.orgSurplus Energy Economics
The home of the SEEDS economic model – Tim Morgansurplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.comMining for renewable energy could be another threat to the environment
Researchers have warned that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production could surpass those…phys.orgPeak Energy & Resources, Climate Change, and the Preservation of Knowledge
Preface. It’s strange that we’re on the cusp of Peak Oil, and yet the only existential threat you ever hear about is…energyskeptic.comStudy casts doubt on carbon capture | Stanford News
One proposed method for reducing carbon dioxide (CO 2) levels in the atmosphere – and reducing the risk of climate…news.stanford.eduDo the Math
I just watched Don’t Look Up! on Netflix. While the movie has a number of flaws, on the whole I recommend it for the…dothemath.ucsd.edu
COP(out) is Dead
I took a few minutes to dig into the text coming out of COP(out)28 this morning.
While 70,000 delegates depart Dubai in their private jets congratulating themselves for a job well done, the rest of us are flabbergasted by the failure.Yet again, the planet has been let down. Anyone paying attention didn’t have high hopes in the first place. COP has been co-opted by the oil industry and is now basically a fossil fuels conference. COP29 is being held in oil-rich Azerbaijan.
This morning, the COP28 final announcement (including recommendations) was released. It is weak and full of loopholes. It’s rhetorical fluff.
COP is dead. Governments and their corporate overlords have abandoned us.
After 28 years of chances, the announcement coming out of COP28 proves we’re on our own.
To demonstrate how weak the recommendations are, I picked apart the announcement. Below I’ve copied the relevant COP suggestions and added my comments underneath.
Further recognizes the need for deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5 °C pathways and calls on Parties to contribute to the following global efforts, in a nationally determined manner, taking into account the Paris Agreement and their different national circumstances, pathways and approaches:
OK. Sounds interesting. Let’s look at those suggested approaches are…
(a) Tripling renewable energy capacity globally and doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030;
A good start. Tripling renewables capacity and doubling growth within 6 years could significantly shift the energy mix, all things equal. Of course, the language doesn’t speak to the mix directly so this is implied.
However, it is possible that non-renewables capacity grows at the same rate resulting in no change to the mix. Moreover, even if the mix shifts to overweight renewables, non-renewable capacity if left unchanged would still spew the same amount of GHG emissions as today.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
World Could Be At The “Foothills Of The Next Copper Cycle”
The world is sliding into a copper deficit over the next couple of years as one of the world’s largest copper mines was forced to shutter operations while demand for the refined metal remains elevated due to renewable energy infrastructure and electric vehicles demand.
Warnings of a copper squeeze come as the Panamanian government recently closed First Quantum Minerals Ltd.’s $10 billion Cobre Panama copper mine, which produces 400,000 tons of copper annually and is considered one of the largest copper mines in the world. This decision emerged after protests and political disputes, culminating in the nation’s Supreme Court canceling the mine’s operating license.
The supply forecast faced further complications with unexpected news from Anglo American Plc last Friday. The miner downgraded copper production forecasts for its operations in South America for the next two years.
Anglo slashed its copper production target for 2024 by 200,000 tons. The forecast noted production levels will drop through 2025. The decline in production is equivalent to a large mine going offline.
Bloomberg pointed out the unexpected removal of 600,000 tons of copper production from First Quantum and Anglo American “would move the market from a large expected surplus into balance, or even a deficit,” adding, It’s also a major warning for the future: copper is an essential metal needed to decarbonize the global economy, which means mining companies will play a key role in facilitating the shift to green energy.”
In June, billionaire mining investor Robert Friedland explained to Bloomberg TV in an interview that copper prices are set to soar because the mining industry is failing to increase supply ahead of ‘accelerating demand.’ He warned:
“We’re heading for a train wreck here.”
Friedland is the founder of Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. He continued, “My fear is that when push finally comes to shove,” copper prices might explode ten times.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXXVII–Decline of ‘Rationality’
January 15, 2022
Teotihuacan, Mexico (1988) Photo by authorDecline of ‘Rationality’
Got involved in a discussion after an Facebook Friend (Alice Friedemann, whose work can be seen here) posted a study on the decline of ‘rationality’ over the past few decades.
My initial response was as follows:
My initial thought is that this shift is more the result of a paradigmatic shift in academia itself from ‘Modernism’ to ‘Post-Modernism’ that has slowly filtered into the mainstream than anything else. As a university student during the entire decade of the 1980s, I was exposed to A LOT of Post-Modernist philosophy that questioned ‘Rationality’. Off the top of my head I recall a number of the philosophies I was exposed to coming from such academics as: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Friedrich Nietzche, Martin Heidigger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stephen Jay Gould, G.W.F. Hegel, H.G. Gadamer, Thomas Kuhn, and Jurgen Habermas. The topics included: rationality, literary criticism, deconstruction, deconstructive criticism, hermeneutics, philology, metaphysics, and dialectics. These all reflected a questioning of the strict ‘factual’ or ‘rational’ universe at one level or another — especially the ‘subjectivity’ verses ‘objectivity’ aspects of ‘science’. Here’s just a few of the books I still have in my dwindling collection:
The conversation has brought back some of my interests that arose during my university education (the ten years were in the pursuit of four degrees from biology/physiology to psychology/anthropology that culminated in an M.A. in archaeology and B.Ed. for a career in education; retired almost ten years now). It’s been a while (decades) since I studied this stuff but here are my two cents on the topic:
There is definitely a difference between the hard/physical sciences and the soft/social ones. Measuring and observing chemical reactions, the movement of stars, or biological/physiological properties then projecting their past and/or future states is quite different then doing this when humans are involved in the equation, be it psychology, economics, history, etc..
Perhaps one of the reasons that the Post-Modern era occurred was the result of the social sciences attempting to legitimise their fields as ‘science’ in order to be taken more seriously. Regardless, I still believe humans cannot ever be ‘objective’, especially about themselves; there are just too many psychological mechanisms affecting our cognition. Then there are the ‘incentives’ that exist in research and academia that impact ‘science’; not only the interpretation of results but their use and distribution/publication.
I also believe that as an endeavour practised by very fallible human beings science cannot help but be ‘subjective’ in nature. On more than one occasion we can see the exact same physical evidence being ‘interpreted’ in diametrically-opposed ways by ‘experts’ in the same field, and consensus, if it does occur, can sometimes take place as a result of persuasiveness and influence of a group rather than as a reflection of the evidence itself. This makes one of the more important aspects of science, the modelling of future states, even more problematic — to say little about our ‘interpretations’ of past states.
Throw complexity, non-linearity, and chaos into the mix and everything becomes less prone to accurate modelling and interpretation, no matter how sophisticated or how much data is input. In fact, the more data and more complex the model the more prone it is to error, especially due to the assumptions that tend to get built into them. The smallest of input errors can result in the largest of output result errors.
Certainly there are some models and projections that are better than others and evidence leads to ‘laws’ that are for the most part, irrefutable; but for better or worse, science tends to work on probabilities and rarely absolutes, with the passage of time being the verification of how accurate the base assumptions and model are.
So, I think we need to be careful as Post-Modern thought is challenged and rejected that the pendulum doesn’t swing too far the other way and as some are doing attempt to place science upon a pedestal from which it cannot be questioned or criticised, ever. I’ve run into individuals who will not accept any questioning of ‘science’ or criticism of the endeavour. As soon as you pose a question you are labelled a ‘denier’ and ignored or attacked. Science is absolute, irrefutable, and always correct. Always.
One of the dangers I’ve observed in an unquestioning faith in ‘science’ becomes the increasing leveraging of cherry-picked science by the ruling class to justify/rationalise policy and/or actions; something that has happened in the past and that we seem to be seeing more and more of with it being accompanied by the insistence that the policy/action taken is absolutely correct, cannot be questioned, and anyone critical is anti-science, anti-rational, anti-government and should be silenced, ostracised, marginalised, deplatformed, etc., etc.. And it could very well be that the apparent increasing questioning of ‘science’ is the epiphenomenon of people questioning the ruling class, not necessarily the scientific process itself.
And while the above beliefs of mine may appear as anti-science to some I would argue they are not. They are simply critical awareness of the fact that science is an endeavour practised by very fallible human beings that live in a social world where they are pushed and pulled in numerous directions by a variety of forces that can and do influence the way they think and interpret their physical world. Add to this the (ab)use of ‘science’ by the ruling class and we have the perfect environment for controversy beyond a simple reflection about the human aspects of the practice of science.
We have to be very careful that science does not become a cult where its adherents are ‘righteous’ and ‘better than the others’ because of their ‘correct’ beliefs. That sounds an awful lot like using science to create a new religion to me.
I close with a passage near the beginning of an article on the idea of a ‘renewable’ energy transition by Professor Emeritus Dr. William Rees and Meghan Seibert that I believe is relevant:
“We begin with a reminder that humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed “stories” that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”
A few ‘related’ articles:
The Rise and Fall of Scientism. Do we Need a new Religion?In 250 AD, Emperor Decius issued a law that obliged all Roman citizens to make public sacrifices to the traditional…thesenecaeffect.blogspot.comIs Science a Religion? – Richard Dawkins * Skeptical Science
Is Science a Religion? – Richard Dawkins The following article was first published in the Humanist, January/February…www.skeptical-science.comThe Twilight of the Narrative: Why the Truth will never be Revealed
Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I…thesenecaeffect.blogspot.comScientific Objectivity
Objectivity is a value. To call a thing objective implies that it has a certain importance to us and that we approve of…plato.stanford.eduThe Coming Age of Illiteracy: What Future for Science?
One of the 16th century reliefs still existing at the monastery of in Tuscany. It is an early example of a purely…thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com
Inflation in Real Life Much Worse Than in Government Fantasy World
Inflation is dead!
At least that’s what you would think if you listen to government officials and talking heads in the financial media.
So, how is this victory over inflation working out for the average person?
Not so great.
Based on official CPI data, price inflation has cooled somewhat, although it remains far above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. That hasn’t stopped President Biden and most of the mainstream financial media from declaring victory over rising prices. Biden even suggested that companies should start cutting prices since inflation is falling.
It’s important to remember that even if we believe the government numbers and price inflation is cooling, that doesn’t mean consumers are getting any relief.
Prices are not falling. They’re just going up slower than they were six months ago.
And those price increases are cumulative. Since January 2022, prices have risen 9.7% based on the CPI. And the CPI is designed to understate rising prices.
In other words, we’re all still coping with much higher prices no matter what the latest CPI report says. And the suffering is far worse than sterile BLS reports indicate.
This becomes clear when we go out in the real world and stop listening to news people spouting government numbers.
Ironically, we can learn more about the actual impact of inflation from the movie Home Alone than we can from some guy on CNBC droning on and on about the CPI.
In this 1990 classic, 8-year-old Kevin McCallister’s family went on a holiday trip to Paris and accidentally left him alone in his house. Chaos ensues.
You may recall that after realizing he’s alone, Kevin makes a trip to the grocery store. After all, a kid has to eat.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
