Tuesday, August 21, 2012

An Exponential Trend Failure Twofer


Click to enlarge.

Nixon Shock

To stabilize the economy and combat the 1970 inflation rate of 5.84%, on August 15, 1971, President Nixon imposed a 90-day wage and price freeze, a 10 percent import surcharge, and, most importantly, "closed the gold window", ending convertibility between US dollars and gold.

Behold the prosperity!

Anyone care to estimate what the new long-term growth rate will be?


Click to enlarge.

There's been no growth since 2000. You may wish to factor that into your estimate. Just sayin'.

This often rage-inducing saying is typically preceded by a blatantly honest statement that's likely to insult at least one person with it's cold, bitter truth.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Industrial Production: Consumer Goods

8 comments:

Troy said...

Consumer goods???

Isn't there an app for that now?

In other news, I've just discovered expedition camping.

Mebbe get some land up in the Santa Cruz mountains to winter on, spend most of my time cruising the N American coast.

Like this guy.

I'm thinking a CNG powered engine might go pretty damn well for this mobility option.

There's only 500-odd fill-up points now, but that will increase.

Cost-wise, CNG is about half of diesel. There's a weight penalty, but mostly because the 3600PSI tanks are heavy. Technology might solve that with alternative methods of NG containment.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Troy,

Expedition camping!

Troy said...

Doomstead to go!

Troy said...

Fuel prices by type

problem of course is that if *everyone* goes CNG, there goes the price.

Prisoners Dilemma.

"Fuel cost savings resulting from heavy-duty trucks powered by liquefied natural gas could mean a 900 MMcf/d increase in natural gas demand "

900 million cf/d = 330B cf per year, not much a dent in production

AllanF said...

It took me a while to get over the ego-crushing aspect and have since come around to actually appreciate about the internet that whatever you can think of, someone's already done it, better than you, and posted pictures.

Stagflationary Mark said...

AllanF,

Infinite monkey theorem

A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end.

Scott said...

Stagnant population, minimal wage growth, credit maxed out means growth for this metric probly half of population growth or 0.5% annually. Throw in fact that a lot of consumer goods are electronic and marginal cost to produce microprocessors is near zero means price growth is low as well.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Scott,

Stagnant population, minimal wage growth, credit maxed out means growth for this metric probly half of population growth or 0.5% annually.

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Gallows humor. Sigh.