(09-13-2012, 02:59 AM)kandrathe Wrote: You often resort to this method of claiming "tinfoil" hat -- but, really?
Yes, really. Stop linking us to people wearing tinfoil hats, and I'll stop telling you what they are. Or do you actually believe that the US economy has been shrinking, year on year, since 1990, to the point where it's now poorer than most Latin American countries? That an apple bought for a dollar in 1990 now costs five dollars?
Quote:You think William Hunt "Bill" Gross (the co-founder of PIMCO) is a conspiracy theorist?
Well, his fund was holding about 35% US treasuries until earlier this year, so, if he actually believed those numbers, he needs to have his head examined. (Now it's all the way down to 20-ish%, which is still completely insane, if you think US inflation is and has been 10% annually, and will be even higher...) It's one thing to predict inflation. It's another to believe you're living in it, it's just being somehow hidden from you by the government. But it's something else entirely to put your money on it - and he hasn't.
So, no, I don't think he's a conspiracy theorist. I think he's a self-interested blowhard, like everyone else on wall street kvetching about inflation. It's not THEM who are unemployed.
Quote:The BLS is run by whom?
A bunch of wonkish statisticians and econ quants? Who do you think runs the BLS? Or, for that matter, who works at MIT? Or Google? Just how far does this conspiracy reach?
Quote:Growth was high in the summer of 2008, until we hit the economic ceiling, and it contributed to the destabilization of the markets. The weak link was a market predicated on growth, so in that case, it helped to pop the real estate bubble. A bubble built by reckless borrowing, and ... a monetary policy which persistently attempted to keep short-term real interest rates low that eventually...
What is the "economic ceiling"?
The price of oil tracks the crisis almost precisely - in the wrong direction for an oil argument. The high water mark for oil prices marks the peak of the bubble, and the low water mark the depth of the trough. Isn't that the precise opposite of what should happen if oil prices are driving this pattern? The alternative, which seems much more reasonable to me, is that it's the economy that's driving oil prices, not the other way around...
You can't switch horses in midstream. If oil is carrying the business cycle, then it's oil. If the business cycle is a monetary phenomenon, then it's money. If it's both, they need to be modelled together somehow. It can't be whichever is more convenient for the explanation.
-Jester