And so this story really got me interested – from Zero Hedge:
We thank Sean Corrigan of Diapason Securities for bringing our attention to the MIT Billion Price real time inflation Index (first reported here) who points out that based on the ongoing surge in prices, which have increased by 1.25% in the last 45 days (December 31, 2010: 101.085, February 14, 2011: 102.353), a simple annualization indicates a 10.6% increase in prices in 2011!…
As I was pumping that gas – which worked out to $10 for three gallons – I wondered if anyone in government is paying attention? I mean, seriously, does Bernanke or Obama not realize it is happening? Or is it that they don’t care that it is happening? If gasoline prices, alone, keep rising as they are then we’ll be at $4 a gallon long before summer…and that will crush our economy as bad as a similar price spike did in 2007. And keep in mind that the really bad effects of such a jump won’t hit for months…in other words, won’t hit until the 2012 election campaign is heating up. You’d think that this sort of knowledge would concentrate their minds a bit.
It could be, of course, that pretty much our whole Ruling Class is out to lunch on this – haven’t seen a lot of GOPers harping on the issue, you know? But for those of us who have had a net decline in purchasing power over the past couple years, such a price rise is devastating…and the lower you go down the economic scale, the bigger the hit. Ruling Class types who have had either stable or increasing pay just might now be seeing it…especially as so many of them probably don’t even fill their own tanks up (but we do – a friend of mine was “fired” by his wife from grocery shopping because he was spending too much money….we’re all now just waiting for her first trip to the store in years and bracing for the results of sticker shock; all sorts of my favorite foods remain unbought by me these days unless they are on special).
Catastrophe is creeping up on us – and I bet it will be “unexpected” in the headlines and economic “experts” will say that the crash came out of nowhere and that no one could see it coming…
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