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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (90318)	9/12/2009 4:59:52 PM
From: Larry S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 94695

Here is another bit for your amusement. The following is from Casey's latest dispatch. I think he as a smart as Rosenberg but has the opposite view of the inflation/deflation question. FWIW, I do all the shopping in this household these days and very little we buy has dropped in price and all of the big items except our NG bill have gone up. Excerpt: "For example, what is money? It used to be one thing, but now it’s become, as Doug Casey correctly terms it, a “floating abstraction.” One might define money in terms of what it can buy, but in a world where money is based on little more than political whim, you risk waking up one morning to find the purchasing power of your money steeply eroded. And what, exactly, is the rate of price inflation? Looking at the long-term data set, you will see a continuum that paints today’s reduced rates in a favorable light. But somewhere along the line, the government reached under the hood and rearranged things. Absent the tinkering, today’s price inflation rate would cause alarm – because it would signal that the consequences of the monetary inflation of the last year will ultimately be that much worse when it comes through. An annualized deterioration in the purchasing value of your money of 10% to 15% is no longer out of the question. However, with the new setup, today’s inflation looks tame and well in hand. That sends a different and almost certainly incorrect signal to market participants. Likewise, unemployment stats. Using yesterday’s calculations, today’s unemployment is considerably higher than even the lofty rates now on display. But thanks to the government’s dressing up, much of it undertaken during the Clinton administration, unemployment appears far lower than it actually is. Today’s numbers are very concerning. The numbers, as previously calculated, would be downright alarming. And it goes on and on. For example, the measures used to determine the quality of bank capital have also been jiggered of late, most notably by dropping the mark-to-market accounting rules. That leaves us wondering just what the world’s financial institutions are actually worth. Today, it's really pretty much anyone's guess." Larry