Commentary
It was another month of devaluation of the dollar for Americans, another month of stealth taxation through monetary debasement. This one matters not only because they show that “very bad” is not getting better. It reveals that nothing the Fed is doing is yet working genuinely to tame the disaster. The dollar’s purchasing power is falling dramatically in real time.
We should all shudder to think what the Producer Price Index tomorrow will look like. The Consumer Price Index today looks terrible enough.
The Department of Labor report reveals an overall annualized rate of 8.5 percent in July, slightly slower than last month’s pace of 9.1 percent. Why did the falling gas price not affect the overall rate, as so many had expected? Well, inflation is a kind of virus that can gradually become endemic in one sector (with demand shifts) and enter another as a pandemic….