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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (72460)	12/17/2007 3:23:31 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Respond to of 116555

Inflation hitting lots of folks very hard, Mish and the BLS to the contrary smirkingchimp.com

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (72460)	12/17/2007 3:35:37 PM
From: Paxb2u	Respond to of 116555

Sea--don't forget that the govt has a lot of financial reasons (pensions etc)for not having the cost of living go up. I don't think they're trying to fool any one, they just don't want to have to have additional budget increases due to SS and govt retirement system payouts---Peace

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (72460)	12/17/2007 4:22:40 PM
From: Bucky Katt	Respond to of 116555

And going up everywhere> Italians Dressed in Sunday Best Forced to Dine in Soup Kitchens>>> Dressed in his best Sunday suit, Fausto Cepponi took his wife and seven-year-old son out for dinner -- at a soup kitchen. ``I never thought I would be in this position,'' said Cepponi, 45, a security guard, dining in an 800-seat charity cafeteria near Rome's main train station. ``I have a job, I had a car, but everything has become so expensive and what I earn just isn't enough. I panic every third week of the month.'' With salaries on hold, prices for staples such as pasta and bread rising and mortgages soaring, efforts to keep up appearances -- ``fare la bella figura'' in Italian -- can no longer disguise that thousands of job-holding Italians are failing to make ends meet. They've been labeled ``The New Poor,'' the title of a book published this year. Prime Minister Romano Prodi attempted to address the issue in September by issuing a decree that 12.5 million of the poorest Italians, 21 percent of the population, will receive 150 euros ($220) next December, the single biggest expense in the 2008 budget. Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi on Oct. 10 dismissed the payment as ``a short-term fix,'' and said the spread of poverty was holding back Italy's economy. ``It's a hidden and humiliating kind of poverty that has emerged, one that the official statistics can't show,'' said Giampiero Beltotto, author of ``The New Poor'' (2007, 201 pages, $19). ``It's the person in the supermarket buying the chicken with today's expiration date rather than a steak at the butcher.'' Stalled Salaries The situation reflects a growing malaise across the European Union. In the U.K., the number of people in danger of falling into poverty rose last year for the first time since 1997, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. In France, two-thirds of those polled in November by Ifop said their purchasing power had shrunk, a 6 percentage point jump since the start of the year. The European Commission forecasts the pace of economic growth will slow next year as record oil prices sap household purchasing power, the euro's rise to a record crimps exports and fallout from the U.S. housing slump spreads. Italians have been among the hardest hit. The average Italian salary rose 13.7 percent from 2000 to 2005, the smallest increase in the EU outside of Germany and Sweden, which boast some of the region's highest wages, according to research institute Eurispes in Rome. The EU average was 18 percent, and U.K. salaries jumped 27.8 percent. bloomberg.com