ANALYSIS: Inflation is NOT a good thing, and we sure as hell DON’T have deflation

You lickle liar

I was going to be ahead of the game this morning, but thanks to the pernicious incompetence of Microsoft, I can’t get into my pc today – you may have seen last night’s post about it. That this company gets away with the invasion of citizen rights – and farcically non-existent service – is down to compliant retailers, bent politicians and I’m Alright Jack f**k you from the very erudite pc users who should be on the barricades against Dial M for Merde. Read some of the comment threads, they’re priceless examples of why the corporate dictatorship is running away with the game.

So I’m now on the backup pc (alright for some, eh?) and my starter today is about deliberately confusing econo-fiscal headings and jargon. I’m talking primarily about this ludicrous term ‘deflation’.

The deflation/inflation thing is a sort of advanced form of walking across the ceiling, where you know really we should be walking over the floor, not falling down onto it head-first. From the ceiling. The Smiley people keep on telling us that wealth trickles down, and we have to take the hit on bank failures as creditors, so that we are protected as taxpayers. Now they want us to believe that inflation is a very good thing.

Inflation is a bad thing, period. It’s a bad thing if the currency is backed by gold, a very bad thing if its backed solely by a Government with sound public finances, and the destroyer of every known socio-political fabric if it’s backed by nothing except the empty promises of the financially incontinent. Guess which model the central banks have been using for the last forty or more years.

The unreal, bank-paper shuffling part of the economy is often described as “like a Cloud” in computing. It’s actually more like cloud-cuckoo incorporated: known values got lost somewhere over two decades ago, and as it is both laissez faire and globally linked in structure, the analogy it best represents is a virus of unknown power that is transmitted easily but without symptoms until it’s too late.

As a result of this alchemic equation with three unknowns, most of the ‘mature’ Nation States would rather play safe by doing everything in their power to protect the finance – upon which globalism feeds while defrauding everyone else – and the two big sources of that are the banks and the markets. So we have Zirp for the banks, bailins for the banks, QE for the stock markets, and manipulation as and when necessary in Libor rates, gold etf paper and so forth.

That last paragraph is an over-simplification, but going to a deeper level would require a book with a 50-page glossary of terms. Suffice to say that, even with all this jiggery pokery going on, there is an ever-present danger of entire financial sector going poof, bang and crash. So the thing to avoid at all costs (we are laughably advised) is deflation. And that’s why everything ‘they’ are doing at the moment is designed to produce inflation – preferably hyper-inflation – in order to wipe out all that unpredictable virus of debt….while telling us that the target is to avoid deflation.

Check out the difference in emphasis there, because it is at the very core of this con. The central banks and pocketed politicians keep on telling us that we have to avoid deflation because it is wicked and evil. It’s bollocks: a sound economy with everyone benefiting from stable or falling prices that keep one’s exports cheap and make imported raw materials cheaper to buy is in truth the inner smart suburbs of a city called Nirvana.

Deflation would be a good place to be were it genuine. The real double-cross in today’s altered Western reality is that most people are suffering from raging inflation.

Why inflation is not a statistic, it is a value assessment

Ultimately, you the citizen are living in an inflationary environment if your fiat currency income is falling, and the amount you need to spend to get the same value as ‘last time’ is rising.

Now consider the following realities in the UK – most of which apply universally in the US and Europe:

1. Both the time period and value of unemployment benefits have been reduced.
2. Real incomes have fallen – for nearly 4 in 5 of us – by 13% since 2003.
3. Local taxes have gone up, but the level of service has gone down – forcing unexpected purchases of (for example) books, security equipment, childcare and pest control.
4. For just over nine-tenths of all those in the bottom quartile of earnings, public transport service costs are rising while frequency and convenience are declining.
5. While the price of durable goods has remained more or less static, durability has collapsed – forcing people to buy, for example, two washing machines every seven years as opposed to one.
6. In some areas of Britain outside the South East, hours required and rates per hour for casual labour have fallen by 15% and 25% respectively.
7. In areas such as hitech and telephony comms, a vicious combination of risible after-sales support, inferior quality circuit boards, malicious updates and unnecessary software ‘developments’ mean that not only prices but also obsolescence are on the increase.
8. Those aged over 60 living at least partly on interest from savings have seen an average annual loss of net income since 2010 in the region of £6450. In that context, COL rises in the State pension are peanuts – and that’s without counting all those retired people (especially women) losing all their pension income for a period rarely less than three years.

This is the bottom line: deflation for the vast majority of Western citizens is a myth. Most of us are suffering galloping inflation in value for money.

One I did earlier: Stretching belief to breaking point

Filed under: For most of us, deflation is a myth & inflation is bad news, Uncategorized Tagged: Galloping inflation, George Osborne, indeflation, The Deflation Myth