Monday, December 17, 2007

Holy Stagflation Cow!

One of the things I try to do a few times during the week is search for "stagflation" in the news using Google. It has been running around 200 news articles or so at any given time. Today there are 1,002 articles. Good grief. We just passed "deflation" and its 641 articles.

December 17, 2007
Greenspan Sees Early Signs of U.S. Stagflation
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy is showing early signs of stagflation as growth threatens to stall while food and energy prices soar, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Sunday.

Thanks Greenspan. You finally noticed food and energy prices. Congratulations. Have you been staring at the core inflation data all this time?

It is nearly enough for me to want to increase my deflationary short-term outlook to something even more deflationary while simultaneously changing my name to Deflationary Mark. Seriously.

April 20, 2004
Greenspan: Deflation is not a threat
Greenspan testified that rising commodity prices are not a big inflation threat, saying labor costs, about two-thirds the costs of goods and services, were declining, though not as rapidly.
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5 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 17, 2007 at 12:12 PM

    "Today there are 1,002 articles. Good grief. We just passed "deflation" and its 641 articles"

    Mark it looks like your due for correction of 1-2 deviates of the xyz'fabognocci retracement

    ReplyDelete
  2. Stagflationary MarkDecember 17, 2007 at 5:38 PM

    abby normal,

    I've "frozen" some of the downside using a stop loss on cattle futures (i.e., a $1.49 hamburger sale recently at Safeway). The capacity of the freezer and the short-term nature of the investment forced me to do a limit order though.

    I've also been increasing my commodity grain exposure in the form of storico pastificio garofalo derivatives. It's 100% investment grade durum wheat semolina enriched macaroni product (i.e., Costco's spaghetti).

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 17, 2007 at 7:02 PM

    http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/europe/food.php#end_main

    Not a bad idea. Many a truth is said in jest

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousDecember 17, 2007 at 8:09 PM

    Mark, sorry,I had not read your recent posts above. Let's do the time warp again

    ReplyDelete
  5. Stagflationary MarkDecember 17, 2007 at 8:33 PM

    abby normal,

    No need to apologize! My most recent post was due to your link. Time is still flowing in the proper direction. :)

    ReplyDelete