Bush II; Day 557: Economic round-up: Inflation? Stagflation? Stock worries?

In line with the post I wrote last week about how you're really not crazy if you haven't been feeling the economic joy, despite the sunshiny reports in the media: investors are worried about inflation, rising interest rates...and now have started a stock market tumble to worry about too.

James Hamilton at EconBrowser shows charts that support his contention that the Fed was "too expansionary" for a few years, but cheers us with his contention that: "That may have been responsible for a slight increase we're seeing now in current inflation. However, the more restrictive measures adopted by the Fed over the last three years should help keep future inflation at acceptable levels."

The Capital Spectator wonders if "stagflation is just around the corner."

This post at Angry Bear illustrates that slight left and slightly right can both be feeling less than optimistic.

I'll close amusingly, by pointing you to The Dead Parrot Society, where Victor opines that all previous generations were "impossibly poor" compared to this one, mostly because they didn't have calculators or the Internet. No really, here's the quote, you be the judge:

"My hunch is that they are both right and both wrong. I do not believe there is a single aggregate statistic that can translate welfare over time. Instead, I ask myself how much money I would have to be given to voluntarily be born in a different year. Personally, I would require an almost infinite amount of money to be born in the eras before modern medicine and pain killers.

I would also require an extravagent amount of money to be born when my parents were born. My father went through grad school without calculators. In contrast, I would pay a significant amount of money to spend my life in an age with the internet as opposed to crappy color TV's that get terrible reception (see Cafe Hayek's 1975 catalog discussion for more). Therefore, in my view, people in the distant past *were* impossibly poor, in the sense that almost no amount of money would induce me to trade places with them."

Anyway, lots of good reading out in the blogosphere about the economy. Just wish some of them didn't outright contradict each other...is there no discipline which hasn't been tainted by pure partisanship?

Posted by elisa at May 28, 2006 04:31 PM | Jobs/Economy/Taxes