Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Real Oil Price: Old Normal vs. New Normal


Click to enlarge.

The Fed wants 2% inflation per year. If real household median income and real household debt per capita can't get us there, then oil will have to do.

Here's the good news. If real household median income starts to fall again, then the Fed may help raise the price of oil to compensate again. In fact, the lower real median income goes, the more help they may offer! Genius!

Put another way, the less you make at work the more it may cost you to get to work! You know, just to balance it out and what not. This is such a great idea. Should give you all the motivation in the world to get paid more.

What label should we use to describe what's going on?

1. Deflation.
2. Inflation.
3. Stagflation.
4. All of the above.

You make the call. As for me, I'm calling it hyperdefstaginflation! We'll need two words to describe what we're feeling as well.

For the optimists: hyperdefstaginfelationed!
For the pessimists: hyperdefstaginfestationed!

As a side note, one can probably deduce the typical feeling based on how little it costs to fill one's gas tank as a percentage of net worth. The closer you are to the top 1%, the more you'll feel hyperdefstaginfelationed! Well, not always. There may be a little bit of whining involved.

January 28, 2014
VC legend Tom Perkins apologizes for comparing attack on rich to holocaust

Perkins told Bloomberg Television that he made the analogy between wealthy Americans and Jews because the rich are a minority, like the Jews who made up just 1 percent of the German population before the Holocaust.


File:If-us-land-mass-were-distributed-like-us-wealth.png (Stephen Ewen)

The 1% minority are being persecuted by that little red dot. Oh the humanity! Although none have lost their lives so far, there's been a great deal of emotional damage. When your net worth is over a billion dollars and you experience even 2% emotional damage, that's tens of millions of dollars! For a 200 pound billionaire, that's easily $6,250 per ounce in tainted self-worth! Don't the poor realize this?

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

8 comments:

mab said...

The Fed zirped up asset prices creating trillions in free lunch wealth for the top 10% or so.

It's only a matter of time until Greenanke wealth (d)effect theories start trickling down into real wages.

You can see the results in food stamps already! But oil prices have nothing to do with the Fed, just ask Krugman or Bernanke.

And here's an added benefit - high stock prices discourage private equity asset strippers from buying companies with debt.

It's a wonderful system - free markets for Main St., free lunches for Wall St.

Mr Slippery said...

Oil is at 3x the median price it was before the Matrix.

Take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed believing miles traveled will set new records any day now. You take the red pill, you stay in Stagflationland and I show you how deep the trend failures go.

Stagflationary Mark said...

mab,

It's only a matter of time until Greenanke wealth (d)effect theories start trickling down into real wages.

Despair.com: Irresponsibility

No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.

They should create an alternate version of that single drop landing in a barren wasteland, lol.

Irrationality

A single raindrop can create a rain forest.

Hahaha! Sigh.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Mr Slippery,

Take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed believing miles traveled will set new records any day now.

I just ate a blue pill.

You take the red pill, you stay in Stagflationland and I show you how deep the trend failures go.

I just ate a red pill.

Oh, man. You need to try this. I've never been so optimistically depressed! The world is my rancid oyster! Woocrap! ;)

Luke The Debtor said...

Funny Mar, the 20% would own key acreage in the Eagle Ford, one prolific oil producer. 40% would own part of King Ranch!

Stagflationary Mark said...

Luke Smith,

But... but... the 1% would own my home, the Space Needle, Poo Poo Point, and the Seahawks (which may go up in value soon, or not)! ;)

Pete said...

I originally read hyperdefstaginf-elation-ed as hyperdefstagin-felatio-ned. I guess either word would do!

Stagflationary Mark said...

Pete,

Hahaha!

Nicely played, sir. :)