The Economic Collapse | October 31 2012
Stuff costs too much. Seriously.
Every time I go to the grocery store these days, I am absolutely horrified by the prices. I try not to buy anything that is not on sale, but the problem is that I am discovering that the new sale prices are the old regular prices. So now paying what used to be “full price” is supposedly a “good deal”. The other way that they are trying to hide rising prices is by shrinking package sizes. As if we wouldn’t notice that a box of 21 garbage bags is now being sold for the exact same price that a box of 25 garbage bags used to be sold for. It is one of my pet peeves. I feel like I am in the middle of some bizarre movie entitled “The Incredible Shrinking Dollar”.
Sadly, I am far from alone. There are millions upon millions of American families that are seeing their expenses continue to rise even as their paychecks remain the same. But neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney seems very concerned about inflation. In fact, the Federal Reserve, QE3 and Ben Bernanke were not even mentioned in any of the three presidential debates. So I think that somebody should start the “Stuff Costs Too Much” Party. Inflation is a tax which is destroying the value of each dollar that we hold a little bit more every single day, and the American people deserve to know the truth about what is going on.
In this day and age, it simply does not pay to put money into long-term savings. When you finally pull your money out it will have far less purchasing power than it originally did.
Way back in 1950, you could buy a first-class stamp for just 3 cents and you could buy a gallon of gasoline for about 27 cents.
We have long been told that gold is a commodity–that it is no different than a bushel of corn or a barrel of oil. In many newspapers, it is listed under the commodity section. With the advent of the Federal Reserve’s recent announcement of “unlimited” Quantitative Easing (QE) or money printing, that has changed. The view of gold as a commodity has circled back to what banker JP Morgan proclaimed to Congress in 1913, “Gold is money and nothing else.” Many folks in the blogosphere have long agreed with the original JP Morgan. It was the rest of the fiat world that wanted us all to believe the enormous lie that gold was only a commodity and not money. Never mind that every central bank on the planet holds gold (and have been buying gold hand over fist for the past few years).
QE3 has barely even started and some folks on Wall Street are already clamoring for QE4. In fact, as you will read below, one equity strategist at Morgan Stanley says that he would not be “surprised” if the Federal Reserve announced another new round of money printing by the end of the year. But this is what tends to happen when a financial system starts becoming addicted to easy money. There is always a deep hunger for another “hit” of “currency meth”. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was probably hoping that 
OPINION ~ It was riotous, side-splitting comedy last week when Sanford Weill, the onetime head of Citibank, 
There has been so much bad economic news out, recently, I do not see how anyone with half a frontal lobe could say the economy is not in trouble. Friday, new unemployment figures were announced, and a weak 119,000 jobs were created. The rate fell to 8.1%, but only because more discouraged workers stopped looking for work and disappeared from the government’s data base. In Friday’s report, economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com summed it all up by saying, “The headline U.3 unemployment rate dropped a statistically insignificant notch to 8.1% in April, from 8.2% in March, but the “good” news was anything but good. The declining pace of headline unemployment reflected an accelerating increase in the number of the headline unemployed giving up looking for work, because there were no jobs to be had. . . . The SGS-Alternate Unemployment Measure, accordingly, notched higher in April to 22.3%, from 22.2% in March.” So, unemployment in the real world actually went up—not down. According to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, planned job cuts rose 7.1% in April, and more than 40,000 more workers are going to be laid off.
“Bottom-bouncing” is the term John Williams of 
It seems every chance the mainstream media (MSM) gets, it tells us things really aren’t that bad. For example, the headline from the Associated Press (AP) said,“Consumer prices on the rise, but inflation outlook is benign.” Who approves the headlines at the AP? Prices are rising, but there is no inflation? Aren’t rising prices the main ingredient of inflation? The story goes on to say, “Consumer prices rose modestly in January on higher costs for food, gas, rent and clothing. But economists downplayed the increase, saying inflation will likely ease in the coming months as prices for raw materials level off.”
Texas governor Rick Perry may have made a fatal gaffe at the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night.
There is a 65 percent chance of a banking crisis between November 23-26 following a Greek default and a run on the Italian banking system, according to analysts at Exclusive Analysis, an intelligence company that focuses on global risks.
