The US Federal Reserve has allowed ... its credibility fall "below zero". Barclays Capital said in its closely-watched Global Outlook that US headline inflation would hit 5.5pc by August and the Fed will have to raise interest rates six times by the end of next year to prevent a wage-spiral. "This is the first test for central banks in 30 years and they have fluffed it. They have zero credibility, and the Fed is negative if that's possible. It has lost all credibility."
posted on Jun 27, 2008 - View this thread

"Hard Numbers: The Economy is Worse than You Know" [full article for Harper's subscribers, a different abridged version] discusses how the Consumer Price Index and other US economic statistics have been manipulated over time. Among other things, the article claims, these changes make Social Security checks 70% lower than they would otherwise be.
posted on May 5, 2008 - View this thread

How far away from work do you live? How much of your pay gets used up to get you to and from work, get you around town, and pay for where you live? As gas and food prices continue to rise, "affordability" has become a more critical notion for everyday Americans. The Center for Neighborhood Technology developed their Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, which aims to help better inform renters and owners about the relationship of transportation options to where one lives.
posted on Apr 28, 2008 - View this thread

The new face of hunger -- “World agriculture has entered a new, unsustainable and politically risky period” says the International Food Policy Research Institute. Food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator because of soaring food commodity prices. So, where does the world get more food? If the extra supplies are to come mainly from large farmers in America and Europe, then they may be trapped in a farm subsidy Catch-22. Increase production per acre? We just learned about the myth of GM crops (previously of MeFi). All of this is why some are just sitting out Earth Day.
posted on Apr 22, 2008 - View this thread

BubbleFilter: Real Estate Roller Coaster. [via] US Home prices adjusted for inflation plotted as a first-person ride on a roller coaster. Keep your eye on the bottom right-hand corner for the corresponding year. Don't worry about the dramatic ending. I mean really, how bad could bad get?
posted on Apr 3, 2007 - View this thread

You will be thoroughly beaten. Zimbabwe, in economic decline for years, may be accelerating towards collapse. Its inflation rate recently hit 1281%, the highest in the world, and a strike by public doctors that began six weeks ago has now spread to nurses, electrical workers and (today) teachers. Those that aren't allowed to strike, like police, are quitting. Last month, Zimbabwe's top judge warned that underfunding had (possibly intentionally) left its judiciary largely unable to function, the nation's electricity provider recently announced that it's broke, its sewage plants started breaking down and polluting urban water supplies, and international observers warned (based on satellite photos, since the government won't allow them in) that famine is looming. In the past, President Robert Mugabe's response to the growing destitution has been to forcibly evict poor urban slum residents into the countryside and bulldoze their homes, to prevent them from organizing politically and to make it difficult for rights organizations to monitor them. Now, he's canceling the 2008 presidential elections (for now, saying that they'll be held in 2010, in conjunction with parliamentary elections, to save money) and ordering security forces to jail and torture political activists. The situation may be approaching a breaking point.
posted on Feb 5, 2007 - View this thread

The RIAA Says CD's Should Have Cost $33.86 in 1996 however, this news article says and shows how their math (and logic) is more than a little skewed.
posted on Feb 3, 2007 - View this thread

Tonight, G.W. Bush is expected to announce a major energy proposal, including cutbacks in gas consumption and development of alternative fuels. High on the list is the development and subsidisation of ethanol, primarily as derived from corn. The utility of corn-based ethanol in meeting energy needs is debatable: its probably weakly energy positive, but not very good in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. More immediately, the US drive towards corn based ethanol has had major effects on the price of corn, and has caused the otherwise free market leaning Mexican President Felipe Calderon to introduce price controls on tortillas. Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown: "The competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its 2 billion poorest people who are simply trying to survive is emerging as an epic issue.". (This post based on a column by Barrie McKenna, unfortunately subscriber only.)
posted on Jan 23, 2007 - View this thread

How much is a penny worth today? Oh, about $0.0105465. Of course, it costs more than that to produce them. Is the penny worth keeping? The old copper penny had bactericidal qualities. You could drop a copper penny in a glass of wine to discern its nature. They were the subject of various high-school chemistry experiments. According to some, they were excellent conductors of luck. And the new zinc pennies? Their melting point is lower, and they don't have the same ring to them. Some people like them, others like to eat them. What are they good for? Not much. The time has come to abolish the penny.
posted on Nov 19, 2006 - View this thread

Dollar's Decline Is Reverberating All this talk about blue state, red state. How's the state of the one thing we all think about equally in common coming along? Isn't it time for a serious, non-partisan, "morally" neutral dialogue on the state of the US economy?
posted on Nov 15, 2004 - View this thread

Harvard Faculty Votes to Put the Excellence Back in the A (NY Times) Grade inflation is over at Harvard after almost 90 percent of '01 grads received some form of honors. What's worse, up until now students who completed a thesis were guaranteed honors by their department.
posted on May 22, 2002 - View this thread