Sadly, even the economists and other "experts" say I was right.
Look: this is basic economics. More dollars means that each dollar is worth less. We have NOTHING to back up the paper that we, as a nation, print. Look at the price of oil (in dollars) vs the cost in gold. It isn't oil that is going up, it's the dollar going down.
And the market is seeing this, and responding.
Were it not for the fact that the oil producing middle east countries continue to price crude oil in dollars, we'd be even farther in the shitter.
Expect things to go even farther downhill as the world realizes that:
A. They don't need or want the dollar as long as we have ever increasing deficits
and
2. We aren't, in the near term, going to be fixing our financial issues as we continue the slide towards a Greece-like economy.
and
III. China stops buying our bonds as they deal with their own economic issues.
and
D: Gold is the only safe place to park your wealth
and
5. The price of oil, which is dependent on demand vs supply, will go up as the demand for fuel increases in the summer, and will likely go even higher this winter....
and
VI: Our current administration doesn't want to do anything to promote domestic supply sources, forcing us to use an ever-increasing portion of the dwindling world supply of oil.
Expect even higher food prices, and an increasingly damaged US economy as prices for everything go up as a result of increased fuel cost....Consumers will have less to spend on other things besides transportation and food, so they'll spend less on other goods, further damaging the economy.
And if OPEC chooses to take other currencies as a peg for the price of gold, our dollar plummets...like a pigeon having been handed a watermelon. With the same result, at the end.
Bet on it.
Prepare for it.
Figure out how to ride the storm out. It might be a long one.
Yup.
ReplyDeleteI've made the crack before that I feel like someone on the Titanic hearing people saying "Look! The sea level's rising!" :o
(WV: "minsub" If the water gets any higher, better hope you've got a minsub.)
You can already see it starting. Food prices (at least in my neck of the woods) have been slowly-but-steadily increasing over the last year or so, and the rate has noticeably increased over the last 2-3 months. Every time I go to the grocery store, I end up saying "That was X cents cheaper the last time I looked / bought it."*
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I have to agree: it's too late to vote our way out of this, and things are going to get bad in the next couple of years.
* Oddly enough, the one I notice most often is the store-brand frozen pizza. It used to be a pretty good deal: ~$2.75 for 1 meal, about 6 months ago. The last time I bought one (last week), it was $3.59. That's a 30% increase in just 6 months. I've seen similar increases in other items, too.
I just posted on this very topic this morning.
ReplyDeletehttp://street-pharmacy.blogspot.com/2012/02/oil-prices.html
None of this is new, just people don't know how to react to it.
ReplyDeleteSmall gardens are easy to do but require some measure of vigilance to keep them clean and producing. Easy to follow plans for subsistence gadening are available here
http://www.earthlypursuits.com/VictoryGardHandbook/VGHv.htm
sometimes you can even find an orginal copy of the Victory garden handbook.