Inflation, Commodities, Growth and Banks

The Fed is a vulture Cactus you got that right. However it can kill the global economy instantly by reducing liquidity and it can produce booms by doing the opposite. As long as the dollar is the reserve currency the Fed can control global liquidity.

But can the federal reserve create a famine? I've pointed out before that the food crisis has more to do with rising economies than collapsing ones. And is Cactus Flower right youngdan? Is Morgan Stanley behind all this?

Well I would say that you might have the cart before the horse in a sense. The famine will follow after the economic crash and as a result of it. What I see now is that it is rising prices that is causing the problems. The problem is not so much that there is a shortage of food but the is a shortage of purchasing power to buy it. We have seen headlines like the price of rice has doubled say. The headline does not say there is suddenly say 30% more eaters. If it were just one food group we might say that there was a bad harvest somewhere. We see the price of oil going up and numerous other things. Bottom line prices are rising.
Few understand inflation. It is not the price of goods going up but it is the value of the currency going down. This is the simplist thing in the world to understand but it is never explained by the media. When inflation is 15% you have smart people who can not see what is happening but crank it up a few notchs like Zimbabee and even a child can tell you that they are printing too much money. If you cast your mind back to last Autumn you will remember that the Fed and the ECB and the other central banks expanded credit by about 1 trillion dollars between them. Now you have prices rising and few can make the simple connection. When the ECB expanded the Euro money supply everybody had 10% of their money stolen and they never realised it. What a stroke that was. Now you have the poor people not being able to afford food and entire countries not having the money to buy food.
Central Banks are the greatest curse ever to hit mankind. Regardless of your religous beliefs it is no wonder Christ resorted to violence only once and that was when he chased the moneychangers from the temple. The Federal Reserve is simple enough to understand but any 2 books at random from Easons would be worth a read. It is a private bank operating under a charter [or license] from the US government. This charter allows it to print money out of thin air. It is the 3rd Central Bank the US has had with the charters of the other two revoked long before this one. The bills in circulation are Federal Reserve Notes. The Fed and the Treasury have a parasitical relationship beneficial to both. The Fed gets to print money which it loans to the Treasury and charges interest on. The Treasury benefits because it can borrow all the money it ever needs. So the Fed is privately owned but it's Achilles Heal is if the public were to say get rid of the Fed. Then Congress could revoke it's charter.
The owners of the Fed are quite simply it's shareholders. When it was set up it was I believe 3 US money houses and some English and German money houses. One of the major US shareholders was The House of Morgan which today is Morgan Stanley. That is why recently when Bear Sterns was in trouble the Fed had the rules set so that they could not borrow from the new facility similar to the Discount Window and Sterns was forced into the firesale by Morgan Stanley which is as a shareholder going to be assisted. The financial system is set up to be complicated to hide the antics.
Morgan Stanley are not behind what is happening because they are a long way from the top. They are a powerfull financial cog though. They will never go bust as long as the Fed exists.
In summary the Fed has created inflation. This has already caused hunger due to the inability of those on the border line to buy. The next and more dangerous phase that I am reading about is that the farmers are not going to plant because the cost of the fuel has risen so much that it is uneconomical for them to put in the crop. The price of the crop would need to be higher than it is but the price has risen as much as it is going for the moment because the eaters can not pay any more.

youngdan wrote:

If you cast your mind back to last Autumn you will remember that the Fed and the ECB and the other central banks expanded credit by about 1 trillion dollars between them. Now you have prices rising and few can make the simple connection. When the ECB expanded the Euro money supply everybody had 10% of their money stolen and they never realised it. What a stroke that was. Now you have the poor people not being able to afford food and entire countries not having the money to buy food.

Central Banks are the greatest curse ever to hit mankind. Regardless of your religous beliefs it is no wonder Christ resorted to violence only once and that was when he chased the moneychangers from the temple.

The next and more dangerous phase that I am reading about is that the farmers are not going to plant because the cost of the fuel has risen so much that it is uneconomical for them to put in the crop. The price of the crop would need to be higher than it is but the price has risen as much as it is going for the moment because the eaters can not pay any more.

It's inevitable that you might begin talking about an international money supply so here's my two cents.

youngdan there is no way we lost 10% of the value of our money as pricing was printed in dual for a period after and there were no complaints unless it was from the penny halfpenny brigade who were adding up all the 1 and 2 cents that some items increased by. (I'd be more than happy to lose that in the short term and gain it again - along with certain other advantages - by the absence of commission to banks when changing money) Maybe you are talking about how the Euro fell initially against the dollar and sterling? In the long run it has rebounded and gone actually over the top which has its own drawbacks and characteristics. (price of oil here is rising slower than in the states, investment from the states and visitors falls away ..)

The liquidity pumped into the banks recently - this is an interesting one and reflects a discussion we were having on Zimbabwean inflation which was something crazy like 2000% or more. Your answer was simple and true to my mind: stop printing money. Your contention is that the ECB and Fed are both at this - printing money thus fuelling a fire. Sidewinder calls Bernanke 'helicopter Ben' because by reducing interest rates in the Fed he is indirectly increasing the money supply thus driving inflation higher in some things because there will again be more money around to get spent. It's just a micro version of the housing market bubble - the more demand the higher the price which applies to a lot of finite goods. My nose is sniffing at another part of economics though and that's goods which are in no real danger of running out - phone credit for example. Entertainment... That's one layer of economics, another is food and oil and houses - all finite items...

There are these layers to the economy internationally now (basic goods, services, communication and entertainment items which I do not count as luxury goods) and it would be good to see Africa as a major producer at some stage too as China and India are emerging so well at present. My contention as well is that money was expanded because the international economy is very varied obviously but too much money got tied up in property too quickly so there was a very sudden lack of liquidity which reflects the initital rush period that was on housing in UK, Ireland and USA anyway which may have explained the money expansion by the Fed and ECB... because if you notice, mortgage holders can avail of lower prices for their interest by switching mortgages now - so there's evidence that that liquidity is coming into circulation in some fashion.

I don't know if that printed money is balanced by a fall in investment either, by the way but I'd guess it is - the housing itself drops in value as we see happening here and in the UK (avg £8000 in last 12 months ARTICLE) so tough titty on the greedy. The money they should pass along their extra bit of cash to the economy by either spending it or putting it in savings whereby it should benefit the economy again by reflecting investments i.e. the establishing of businesses and technologies that need initial risk - mobile phones for example - the world is unthinkable without them now but the industry must have come initially from investment which then by itself expanded the money supply in a capital way as more workers were needed, more infrastructure more R&D etc. etc. It's a good market as an example because its a very recent one and fulfills some basic enough needs that humans have ... but it couldn't have been done without an expandable money supply. And because tech of this nature is not based so much on finite resources (oil, expertise, time) it can be seen as one of the heralds of the New 'Long Boom' Economics spoken about in Wired a long time ago. (Recently a video game earned half a billion dollars in it's first week of sale !)

This paragraph has turned into an essay but I have to finish. Why is the price of food under pressure now? It simply must be the price of oil but I'll have a look in the IHT today there was an article in yesterday's one about the rising cost of food. Oil and expertise and possibly time are contributing to this if it's on a global scale. Oil oil oil. How else can it be explained? The Fed and ECB haven't expanded the money supply by that much youngdan - it would be completely diluted very quickly in world markets. Of course that's possibly what's happening - are people eating out more because of their extra spending power? I am for one.

Lastly, if the ECB or Fed are incompetent or evil in any way then it's with relation to Time in my view; our own banks did it on a local scale with the housing market here over the past while - credit became available (and was allowed to) which led to a bubble. The contention of many is that this could have been/should have been managed better in terms of mediating cash for housing of a sustainable character both economically and ecologically which would have taken longer to implement but less shocks along the way. Plus it gives other sectors, such as those involved with food, time to adjust. I'm guessing that the food crisis will continue for as long as the stress on oil continues and one solution is to tax the shit out of Americans where they spend on petrol. Sorry youngdan you know this would be one of my solutions because I don't think you should have the right to devour half the world's oil at half the price of everywhere else. Oil is translatable into money and if your own solution is end the expansion of money then it's also end the availability of cheap oil - to Americans. [http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/05/30/news/Global-Gas-Prices.php] Think gas prices are high? Try $11 in Turkey[/url] (From reading the iht yesterday too I am aware that oil prices are being probed by US regulators so if you want to argue that point let's go over to the oil and energy watch thread in Machine Nation/Energy - Linked Article : Oil prices to be probed by US regulator CFTC

But this:
Burning food: why oil is the real villain in the food crisis


There was a good thread on money on p.ie in February where me and youngdan contributed. There were some excellent contributions from seabhcan, feargach and others. There was some good media too - I enjoyed The Preacher that zuton threw at me.
http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?f=161&t=31277&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Enjoy

Let me get back to the 10% and be a bit more clear. I am not talking about when the money was changed over I am talking amout the day last Autumn when the ECB pumped 350 billion Euro. The Euro money supply was about 3.5 trillion. Now there is an increase in the supply of Euro and when equilibrium is restored the prices of goods will have gone up by 10%. This takes a while to filter through the system but the end result can only mean that the buying power of the money in your pocket is 10% less due to the action of the ECB.
Many there seem to think that we pay less for oil. Everybody on Earth pays the same for oil. It is not our fault that the Irish government taxes petrol to the hilt.

youngdan wrote:

Well I would say that you might have the cart before the horse in a sense. The famine will follow after the economic crash and as a result of it. What I see now is that it is rising prices that is causing the problems. The problem is not so much that there is a shortage of food but the is a shortage of purchasing power to buy it. We have seen headlines like the price of rice has doubled say. The headline does not say there is suddenly say 30% more eaters. If it were just one food group we might say that there was a bad harvest somewhere. We see the price of oil going up and numerous other things. Bottom line prices are rising.

Is half this thread not about population rise? The increased price of rice has been put down to increasing demand, less land for rice production. Rice affects all cereal prices and through them milk, and perhaps other livestock foods. Less land is blamed mainly on urbanisation, and land being used for other foods to feed a rising middle-class lifestyle.

How much does the population rise each year. About 1% maybe. The media are reversing cause and effect. The riots are not about a shortage of rice but because of the skyrocketing price of rice. If you are a millionaire you can have all the rice you can eat. So for monetary reasons the price is rising strictly due to inflation.
Added to this is the small but important drop in food production due to the biofuels. The result of the biofuels could be predicted by anyone. The question is are the people who pushed this brain dead stupid or is it a deliberate attempt to reduce population.
Next season will see the next tightening of the screws as the crops are not planted.
Is it deliberate or are they stupid.
The sane thing would be that the biofuel subsidies be abolished and rice and cereal subsidies introduced. If this happens I will admit to being mistaken

Our Green Party is backing biofuels in defiance of all sense and the advice of the UN.

Where I think you are wrong youngdan is that inflation happens when there is a shortage: prices go up when people compete for limited amount of goods and bargain up for them. Then there is pressure for higher wages so that people can afford the more expensive goods - then the banks print a bit extra. But because it is not earned money and doesn't reflect increased production it is a devaluation of the currency and more of it is required to buy anything.

Prices rise with supply and demand but what I am talking about is where everything is rising in price. The loop that you describe starts at the bank. Just think what would happen if the bank did not print the bit extra as you put it. You have it back to front. Rising prices is the result of inflation not inflation being the result of rising prices.
Why do you think the Green party there are pushing Biofuels if they are as you say. Why is there always some crowd fighting against a windmill farm as Auditor remarked on elsewhere. Why is there so few real activists fighting for Tara.

Why indeed, it is a sorry sorry thing. Having just listened to Anthony and the Johnsons Someone and Marc Almond's River of Sorrow back to back I am going to pack it in for the day.
Things will be brighter in the morning.

I note that Ford are taking production of their new Fiesta to Mexico.

This is a bit of a digression from the world government theme but I'm making a point somewhere I think with regards to the 10% increase in the money supply resulting in a 10% decrease in your value of money. I see where you're coming from but I don't think it's true to say the value of your money falls across the board - instead I think it gets spread out over the economy. In this case I think a lot of money had been very suddenly tied up in property which created a speculative bubble which led to a very quick skewing of a big part of some economies in one direction - economies such as the UK and Ireland and HolidayHomeLand in Spain, Morocco etc. People were painted into corners by their mortgages leaving less money around for other expenditure - a lot of which expenditure may not really be inflationary at all once the money is spread around.

I firmly believe that cash injection was nourishment for other areas of the economy than housing and that the housing market took most of the devaluation of the extra money, not a general rise in prices because the economy is too varied. It seems that the English and Irish got some windfalls and then invested it in property which led to a poorly managed speculative bubble for which the homeowners and speculators themselves should pay. Or should they? According the Sunday Indo today (sindo), our government should now provide a safety net for those people who speculated and are now in trouble. It's possible to shop around for a better deal on your mortgage, they should be told to do that.

The Sindo article is criticised by a few on The Pin and rightly.

xman wrote:

Oh dear. The clarion call goes out for a taxpayer sponsored bailout for all the debt ridden greedy/idiotic Celtic Debt Monkeys.

Their irrational borrowing has fucked the economy up. Now the Sindo wants the government to fuck it up even more for everyone by bailing them out.

Quote :

Mortgage rescue agency is needed to slay the Hyena
State must act now to stop banks foreclosing on homeowners, says Gavin Duffy

The Celtic Tiger and its best performing cog, the construction boom, has served Ireland brilliantly because it has distributed wealth evenly across all social classes, education levels and regions.

In fact, there is only one clearly discernible group who lost out, the Travellers. Caravans don't go up in value like houses and so the Traveller is significantly worse off now than before the Tiger.

Jesus, Mary & Joseph. Is this a joke ???

This has to be a joke. Gavin continues

Quote :

So Gunther in Bonn is the faceless person who makes the decision to call in your mortgage, not your local "friendly" banker. The clause in most mortgages that gives the lending institution the right to foreclose on you and get all their capital back, despite your regular and punctual payments, may be exercised by banks suffering in a global liquidity crisis.

Oh noes, TheSkyIsFallingIn! You're up to date on your mortgage and your house is taken off you and you're thrown out onto the street because Gunther in Bonn has had a tanty. Are you FOR REAL Gavin Duffy?

What kind of baseless scaremongering is this?

Quote :

a State-backed mortgage rescue agency is the seatbelt Ireland Inc needs immediately.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/mortgage-rescue-agency-is-needed-to-slay-the-hyena-1393783.html

Ireland Inc, or Canny McSavvy Inc? Desperate rubbish Gavin. 0/10.

Sindo Economic Nonsense Division - Part 2

Quote :

Housing market bad on both sides of coin
Critics blame Cowen for failing to act on stamp duty earlier
By DANIEL McCONNELL

Yes folks. The Sindo is STILL banging the "uncertainty over stamp duty" drum, two years later. Give me strength.

Quote :

Many of those wanting to buy a house have had their hopes dashed by the ending of 100 per cent mortgages and have been forced to delay their plans and save for a deposit.

Oh cry me a river Daniel. So fucking what. People actually have to save a deposit? This is just like what the Nazis did to the Jews, isn't it.

Quote :

In the face of the increasing number of banks taking back properties, the need now arises for establishing a State- backed mortgage relief fund beyond the current system set in place by the Department of Social Welfare.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/housing-market-bad-on-both-sides-of-coin-1393782.html

Yeah baby! Bring on the bailout. Now EVERYBODY gets to pay.

http://www.thepropertypin.com/viewtopic.php?t=10431

I've moved this into a new thread called Inflation, leaving World Government to look after itself.

I apologise for posting a long article without a link, but I think it responds directly to a few things said so far. It comes from the English Daily Mail, a very right wing paper, and gives an inkling of how the writing is on the wall for the relative privilege of the middle classes in Europe as it has been in the US.

Quote :

How the Masters of the Universe are murdering the middle class by gambling on black gold

By Dan Atkinson
Last updated at 11:09 PM on 31st May 2008

The Masters of the Universe, those big-name traders of the City and Wall Street, have a brand new toy to play with: oil.

Last month, waves of speculation pushed the price of 'black gold' to all-time highs.

Although world supply and demand are thought to be roughly in balance, the bright young things working for the investment banks and hedge funds have bid up the cost of a barrel of crude oil through the stratosphere.

Despite some easing last week, the price remains at record levels.

We will all have to pay, and not just at the filling station. Expensive energy means slower economic growth, fewer jobs and less tax revenue, hence less money to spend on health, education and public safety.

Social tranquillity and the quality of life could take a big hit. Thanks, guys.

Feeding frenzy: Traders deal in crude oil in New York

In fairness, we ought to be getting used to this by now. After all, we are only just starting to foot the bill for the financial elite's last jolly jape: the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Here, they bundled up huge quantities of flaky American and other mortgages, declared them to be top-quality investments and flogged them to investors - including banks - around the world.

So complicated were these packages of IOUs that nobody was sure which bank held how many.

Once - as was inevitable - low-income Americans started defaulting on their home loans, banks stopped lending to one another because no institution could be sure which of the others could be brought down by these 'toxic securities'.

Northern Rock in Britain and Bear Stearns in the United States were the biggest victims of the lending drought that followed. We bailed out the former, US taxpayers rescued the latter.

And the fallout means there are fewer mortgages available for would-be homeowners, and people with perfectly good credit ratings are having their plastic cards taken away.

Before all that, we had the massive speculative bubble in commercial and residential property in Britain, now deflating with consequences that can only be guessed at, and the crazy boom in dot.com shares in the late Nineties, regardless of the fact that few of the companies involved had ever turned a profit.

The bursting of the dot.com bubble in March 2000 threatened to drag the West into recession, hence those other Masters of the Universe - the much admired central bankers led by America's Alan Greenspan - cut interest rates, flooding the system with the cheap funds that would make possible ... the next bubble.

Normally this funny money would have fuelled inflation, but a combination of cheap goods from countries such as China and cheap labour from largely uncontrolled immigration has kept the lid on price rises - until now.

This happy (for some) arrangement is drawing to a close, and with it the low inflation era. But more of that later.

With the lifeblood of the world economy falling victim to the financial elite's mania for speculation, oil contracts for delivery as far ahead as eight years were snapped up, driving the long-term price to $140 a barrel, more than 12 times its level ten years ago.

Of course, if the traders truly believe this is what the price will be, their actions make sense.

But there is one big problem with this case for the defence: the majority of these contracts never involve actual delivery of oil. They are purely speculative instruments - or gambling tickets, to put it less politely.

Like crazed versions of Sergeant Bilko, financiers always have to find something to bet on.

Unlike the gambles of television's maverick serviceman, however, these bets can inflict real damage on the economy.

Ten years ago, for example, the gilded elite of the City and Wall Street were wagering heavily on oil. But this time, they were betting on the price going down.

Then, as now, supply and demand were broadly in balance, but the price of a barrel was driven down to about $10.

Giant energy companies reacted the only way they could, which was to tear up plans for new drilling and extraction.

The $10 level was clearly unsustainable, and became even more so as China and India joined the queue at the world's petrol pump.

The extra oil that would have been pumped from those cancelled wells could have helped satisfy that new demand and moderated subsequent price rises.

Again, everybody has paid the price for the speculators' profits.

Strangely, it was the oil market that gave the Masters their big break in the first place.

Prior to the 1973 energy crisis, banking, broking and commodity trading were kept firmly under control.

The City and Wall Street had been in the doghouse since the Thirties, when they were blamed for the speculative bubble of the Roaring Twenties whose crash in 1929 ended the era of The Great Gatsby and heralded the Great Depression.

In the post-war world, they were rigorously supervised by national authorities. Masters of the Universe they were not.

But the soaring price of oil in the mid-Seventies, and the inflation that went with it, changed all that.

After decades of keeping their heads down, the financiers and their intellectual fan club had a riposte to the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

Here was a crisis that could be blamed on politicians rather than bankers and traders.

'There has been an energy crisis because government created one,' wrote Milton Friedman, doyen of freemarket economists, in 1979.

He was good enough to add: 'Of course, government has not done so deliberately.'

With controls removed, Friedman and others argued, the smooth flow of money round the world would restore calm to global markets as prices stabilised at their correct level.

Controls were duly dismantled, but things did not work out exactly as advertised.

For example, the sterling exchange rate was $2.44 in 1980 and plunged to close to $1 five years later.

Not a lot had changed in the British economy, so which was the 'correct' price for sterling?

Much the same could be asked at different times of most major currencies, most stock market indices, most commodities and most other financial instruments.

The guilty secret is traders need to trade; they need to make bets, and to make a bet you need things to change one way or another. They would rather be wrong than not bet at all.

But the gambles of this new aristocratic class of bankers, brokers, traders, hedge-fund managers and corporate financiers are just one aspect of their activities.

Another is the relentless asset-stripping that has been under way for at least 20 years, especially in Britain, which in many ways has been the laboratory for their activities.

First, they broke up and sold off British manufacturing industry, then came the railways and the airports - with all the benefits for the passenger that we can see.

Thanks to the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) (PPPs to us - cf)- a sort of hugely expensive mortgage scheme under which public assets are pawned for decades to come - they have now
got their hands on schools, hospitals, nursing homes, fire and police stations and many other public facilities.

In return for keeping the huge debts involved off the Government's books, Ministers have promised PFI investors lavish returns in future years.

Hungry for fresh meat, financiers and their cohorts now have middleclass careers in their sights.

Pillars of the community such as solicitors and family doctors are in the process of being turned from independent professionals into corporate wage slaves, thanks to legislative and organisational changes already in train.

The telling phrase, 'Tesco law', makes our future clear. From 2010 investors will be able to take shares in legal practices and mass-produced legal 'advice' will be dispensed through booths in supermarkets for corporate profit.

Similarly, plans to bulldoze GPs into 'polyclinics' (happening here to - cf) may sound like something from the Soviet Union, but the added twist is that the clinics can be owned by commercial operators and the doctors turned into mere employees.

Before too long, accountancy will also be robbed of its independent status and transformed into a profit-earning arm of financial corporations.

What the consequences of this will be for the accuracy of company audits, given that accountants may end up auditing a business with which their own employer is associated, has yet to be determined.

And in the furore surrounding the closure of Post Office branches across the country, it is forgotten that the supposed reason behind it is the 'need' for Royal Mail to compete with private operators.

In the early Nineties, proposals to throw postal services open to competition were shelved after massive public opposition.

They were taken off the shelf again quickly enough, this time without much by way of public consultation.

Sceptics may suspect that our Masters of the Universe won't use the mass-produced, off-the-peg professional or medical advice they plan to sell to the rest of us. They prefer one-to-one consultations in a traditional setting.

More worrying still is the fall-out from the financiers' activities involving middle-class finances.

Perhaps the most curious behavioural trait of the Masters of the Universe is their willingness to demand public bail-outs, which is very puzzling given their readiness in the old days to condemn the fondness for subsidies for the likes of British Leyland and British Steel.

Now, however, the taxpayer is exposed to £25 billion-odd of Northern Rock liabilities and £50 billion-plus of Bank of England support for the banking system as a whole, details of which are to be kept secret indefinitely.

Beyond that, the need for the Bank, the Federal Reserve Board and other institutions to pump the system full of money to spare the Masters the consequences of their mistakes is now, finally, feeding through into higher inflation.

And inflation has traditionally hit the middle class hardest, as will any tax rises that may be needed should those bail-outs go wrong.

It was the American novelist Tom Wolfe who, back in 1987, wrote that Wall Street high-flyers saw themselves as Masters of the Universe, sticking our financiers with a nickname they have never shaken off. He did so in a novel called The Bonfire Of The Vanities.

With soaring oil prices, resurgent inflation and the prospect of higher taxes, that bonfire is now well and truly blazing.

• The Gods That Failed, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Bodley Head on Thursday. To order your copy for £12.99 inc p&p, call 0845 606 4213.

In my view a huge social divide is opening up (it was there already but masked by inflationary credit based spending) and the minority that have vast wealth and power will rip off the rest of us the best they can. The Lloyds scandal in Britain in the 90s gave an inkling of how it works - a few 'names' in the loop looked after themselves and dumped all the bad business onto the wealthy middle classes who had begun to dabble. The paring up of Bear Stearns and passing it on to Morgan Stanley is the modus operandi. The frogs will only find out about the draining of the pond when it is good and dry.

In relation to the Property Pin discussion, the Indo is talking nonsense - they are just wanting to pump up the exhausted economy with another round of even more inflationary credit. But the other side of the story is, as I posted somewhere here yesterday - the banks are facing into big difficulties and pressure to make shares issues that are essentially themselves inflationary, or go bust.

They are dangerous times. I might go and have another look at how those Mondragon Co-ops survived the last recession better than conventional firms.

What is happening now is trying to keep the show on the road for another 12 days. When I said back in July the middle class were going to be eliminated down to poverty I was laughed at. My latest post on the iseq thread back yonder shows you has thelast laugh.

Back a while the discussion was about how much oil was up in Alaska. Sutherland knows the answer to this question but I believe this Williams guy who says there is a trillion barrels. It is being kept off the market and starvation and population reduction is at hand. No one else here believes that but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Hopefully a No vote in 2 days time will put a spanner in the works. I now see figures for the estimate for the oil in the Dakotas. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/5824026.html
This field is 413 billion barrels which greater than the entire mideast.
When I see the picture of the 3 stooges on the paper spinning their treason it amazes me that anyone believes them. Anyone who votes for FF is an eejit but anyone that votes for the other two is totally beyond hope.

That's a cool link - they're drilling two miles below the earth sideways ... is it all worth it? There must be shitloads of oil in the world under the earth somewhere though - we can't have found it all can we?

With the technology now they can see deeper I guess. This one field on it's own could supply Earth with 12 years supply. The politicians are bought and anyone that thinks they care about the citizen is dreaming.

There is an interesting thread on p.ie on inflation which I see you've just contributed to, youngdan.
http://www.politics.ie/viewtopic.php?f=161&t=36704&p=1208166#p1208166

It's interesting that you say it's an increase in the money supply and I assume you are not relating the increase directly to price increase although that is the side effect too often of inflating the money supply so both phenomena (growth of money supply and price increase) have become synonymous in one word - inflation. Would that be any way accurate?

Now, inflation shouldn't always lead to price increase, should it?

If supply and demand were to remain equal, say the number of farmers and the acres of land available then the price would still rise exactly by the rate at which the supply of money is rising. A big change in supply and demand will lead to price changes but a constant like a dog license will be more expensive than it was 30 years ago solely due to inflation. Price rises and inflation are 2 different things one being a result of the other. The government will try to hide what inflation is because if the people realised that the value of their money was dropping because they were printing bundles of it for a welfare state they would be up in arms