Of Two Minds

The only dynamic that’s even faintly “capitalist” about America’s Crony-Socialism is the price of political corruption is still a “market.” The supposed “choice” between “capitalism” and “socialism” is a useful fabrication masking the worst of all possible worlds we inhabit: Capitalism for the powerless and Crony-Socialism for the powerful.

Is inflation “transitory” in your household budget? Really? Where? The Federal Reserve has been bleating that inflation is “transitory”–but what about the real world that we live in, as opposed to the abstract funhouse of rigged statistics? Here’s a simple test to help you decide if inflation is “transitory” in the real world.

Nobody seems to notice the ‘diminishing returns’ on Fed manipulation, oops, I mean ‘intervention’. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that everything that will eventually matter is ignored until it does matter–but by then it’s too late.

The Fed’s god-like powers will be revealed for what they really are: artifice and illusion. The Fed will be proven catastrophically wrong about inflation for the simple reason that inflation isn’t transitory, it’s sticky: when prices rise due to real-world scarcities and higher costs, they stay high and then move higher as expectations catch up with reality.

We’re getting a real-world economics lesson in rip-your-face-off increases in prices, and the tuition is about to go up–way up. Inflation will be transitory, blah-blah-blah–I beg to differ, for these reasons. There are numerous structural sources of inflation, which I define as prices rise while the quality and quantity of goods and services remain the same or diminish.

People caught on that the returns on the frenzied hamster wheel of “normal” have been diminishing for decades, but everyone was too busy to notice. The superficial “return to normal” narrative focuses solely on first order effects now that people can dispense with masks and social distancing, they are resuming their pre-pandemic spending orgy with a vengeance, which augurs great profits for Corporate America and higher tax revenues.