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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: benwood who wrote (78240)	1/27/2007 6:27:00 PM
From: bart13	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

I was thinking of a world wide purchasing power in real terms, so it would be the real earnings growth chart but modified by the value of the dollar compared to what you'd have to use in a foreign country. For charting's sake, it could simply be a basket of currencies (the overall dollar index?) but it would also be interesting to see how we've fared in terms of buying power in specific countries, too. I used the broad dollar index, based as 1 in 1973 (.31 today) and did a simple multiply on the CPI adjusted values. It didn't turn out quite like I expected but is reasonably close, is illustrative and sure does confirm world purchasing power issues... regardless of various Pollyanna or Panglossian views of some. I'm uncomfortable with the broad dollar index value over the last 5 years or so, it sure appears to have been "fiddled" via weighting changes... and also have nothing to prove it one way or the other. Unfortunately, I don't have and don't know where to find any breakdowns in enough detail by the top 1%, next 10%, etc. Z1 doesn't have data at that detail and the data that I do have has such large gaps that I wouldn't be comfortable with interpolation. If anyone knows of better detail than available from epi.org, please let me know. There's the Big Mac Index from The Economist, which addresses relative costs in a number of countries but you're likely already aware of it. I have that data and a chart going back to 1996 or so, but can't post it due to copyright issues. Here's one from 2005 though from them: