Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Inflation watch

 

The trickle of reports about inflation began to swell some months ago.  Now it's approaching a torrent, as more and more observers point out the obvious - that inflation is real, it's here, and it's perilously close to out of control.  A few headlines from the past week:



What troubles me most about those headlines is that they aren't being repeated in the mainstream media.  It's almost as if the media have decided to suppress news about inflation, to protect the Biden administration's economic policies - which are leading directly to even more inflationary risk.  A lot of people are going to be caught very, very short if the worst happens.

When you find sources such as JP Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffet and others of their ilk speaking out about inflation, that bodes ill for the future.  These are people and institutions at the very top of their field.  If they're worried, we should be too, as we discussed last week.

Last night The Silicon Graybeard published a list from Reddit summarizing inflation in various commodities.  It ranged from 8% to 470%.  Click over there and read it for yourself - then compare your own shopping basket to those numbers.

Peter


3 comments:

LindaG said...

We have noticed it almost from the day Biden took office.
No matter what we purchased almost everything seemed to be a hundred dollars or more.

Yesterday my husband picked up a few things and asked me to go over the receipt because it came to just over $100 and he didn't think it should have.

Doesn't matter what the msm has to say. Unless you don't have to buy things, you know.

Old NFO said...

A cart full of groceries will be WELL over $100. And gas is up almost a dollar a gallon since January. Sigh...

Beans said...

To be fair, a significant portion of last year's potential corn harvest was hurt by various random acts of climate. So it is no surprise that between higher fuel costs and costs by the farmers and grain storing companies for repairs to infrastructure (real infrastructure, the wind storms hit when most grain bents were very empty, so not a lot of structural support inside) that corn and other grains and soybeans and the things that feed off of all the grains and beans will be going up.

Factor in increased prices for several states increasing their minimum wage, increased insurance prices (what? you think that just because there haven't been riots in the country that only the city folk will be paying higher insurance prices? I laugh... sadly.) And all the other incidentals like the lack of bodies due to the Covidiocracy and payments to people to not work and everything is going up.

Then the Jerk at 1600 and his cabal of handlers and followers have to go and open their mouths and shut down pipelines, attack the petrochemical industry which then attacks the transport and energy production industries all which then attack all the other industries in a vast trickle-down pee storm of everyone being peed on and it's only surprising that prices haven't gone through the roof on everything. They've actually stayed lower than I expected.

And Old NFO? A cart load of groceries has been well over $100 since Clinton took office. It really jacked up under Barky the Lightbringer's reign of terror, and dropped some during Trump.

Not surprisingly, the cost of food and goods pretty much followed the rise and fall in fuel costs.