Judy Stark, the Homes and Garden editor for the St Petersburg Times, in
Florida, writes that it is a "sign of the times" when a county-sponsored
workshop on vegetable gardening has suddenly hit the 200-person capacity of the
room.
She says this means, "There is great interest in growing your own food so you
know what's in it or on it, and avoid high prices at the grocery store."
Fabulous! So now we know that the economic miracle that Alan Greenspan as US
Federal Reserve chairman was supposed to be delivering to us - with all of that
excessive creation of money and
credit to finance the creation of permanent government programs, permanent
inflation in the money supply, permanent inflation in consumer prices and
permanent inflation in government employment - has now required some people to
take up subsistence farming to survive.
And it may be Canadians are becoming small-scale farmers again, too, as
Forextv.com reports that "Economists Say Canadian Labor Force Drop Shows Job
Boom Is Over", which is the reaction to a CEP News report that "55,200 Canadian
jobs disappeared in July, the largest monthly drop since the early 1990s. The
unemployment rate actually shrank, dropping a tenth of a point to 6.1% as an
even larger number of people - more than 74,000 of them - dropped out of the
labor force during the month."
The numbers are similar in Quebec, as the unemployment rate there "edged up by
two ticks to 7.4% while in Ontario, the rate fell to 6.4% from 6.7% in June as
42,000 people'' left the labor market.
It makes you wonder how people "left the labor market", as this would imply
that their families did not constantly hound them and harass them to get
another job right away, right now, now, now, now, and how me just sitting there
on the couch in nothing but a pair of underwear and sucking down yet another
bottle of cold brew proves that "Mom was right! You are a terrible, worthless,
lazy father who doesn't care about us!" and I am screaming back at them, "I
could have told you that, you stupid damned kids!"
As I interpret it, Forex.com figures that the government is gearing up for a
frontal assault on the people, where they will herd us mercilessly into
processing facilities to turn us into Soylent Green, as is suggested by the
fact that "A gain of nearly 30,000 public sector positions partially offset the
loss of 95,000 in the private sector."
In fact, "Since July of 2007, employment in the public sector has grown by 6.1%
compared with plus 0.5% for the private sector." Yikes!
All of this unemployment must be impacting demand for goods and services, which
may be what prompted Jim Sinclair of jsmineset.com to ask a lot of questions,
including "Do you really believe that present inflation is demand driven?"
This is the crux of the argument by Mark Gertler, a professor at New York
University, who unbelievably writes to the Financial Times to take issue with
the whole idea "that monetary policy is the root cause of the recent increase
in the relative prices of energy and food." Huh? Astonishingly, he says that
concentrating on the increases in the supply of money "dismisses the critical
non-monetary factors, including increasing commodity demand from strong
capacity growth of the global economy, coupled with short-run supply
constraints and various government distortions."
To this, I laugh out loud and make rude noises in his direction as if someone
farted, which makes me laugh out loud some more, and so I make more farting
noises, which makes me laugh even louder, and then I am laughing so hard that I
actually fart for real, which makes it even FUNNIER and pretty soon I am
laughing so hard I can't catch my breath, which is good because it smells like
someone farted.
Well, I soon realized that the farting thing was not my most brilliant
attention-getting device, as I can see the security guards gathering to plan
their rush upon my position and hustle me out of here.
So, not wasting another precious moment and obviously without waiting to be
asked why I am frantically waving my hand in the air like a lunatic and
shouting, "Hey! Hey!" over and over, I instead shout out, "Hold on there,
doofus! Demand is but desire made manifest, and there is no limit on desire!
And if you don't believe me, take your New York University butt over to my
house and ask my family something like 'Hey, how would you like a nice
burrito?' and you will notice they all say they would love to have a burrito!
"Then ask them 'Hey, how would you like a new car?' and they will all say that
they would love to have a new car AND a burrito! And when you ask them, 'And
how are you going to pay for this stuff, you greedy little bastards?' you will
learn the ugly fact (as they have learned the ugly fact), that without the
money to finance infinite desires, 'demand' doesn't really mean squat.
"And so you can also forget about 'capacity growth', too, because without the
money to fuel the demand growth, there ain't no stinking capacity growth, and
thus there won't be any 'short-run supply constraints', although there will
always be 'various government distortions.'"
In short, the availability of money (the increase in the money supply) must
come first if you are going to get systemic inflation in prices, and not the
other way around, which you would think some hotshot economist from New York
University would know!
And I'll bet he doesn't know that gold and silver are the "investment of
choice" in response to such monetary insanity, either, so he'll get his
comeuppance, which pleases me greatly, for some reason. Hahahaha!!
Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group,
serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo
Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those
who desperately deserve it.
(Republished with permission from
The Daily Reckoning. Copyright 2008, The Daily Reckoning.)
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