Dollar sinks as gold hits 27-year high

That wasn’t even the cool part of this:

The dollar hit a record low against major currencies and gold reached a 27-year high on Friday as investors ignored data suggesting that inflation moderated last month.

Over at the blog The Big Picture, yesterday (or earlier) I saw a terrific term coined for this idea of defining inflation ex-food and ex-fuel (you know, those two things appreciating rapidly, that everybody has to buy): Inflation ex-inflation.

Nice, no? It was in reference to a very cool piece on Bloomberg about the inflation scam (not the conspiracy theory-ish one, but the actual bullshit idiotic idea that we can define inflation as not including food or fuel during an era of depreciating dollar value, terrible crop yields and peak oil).

As the Big Picture noted, if we used inflation properly, it would wipe out most of the advance in GDP over the last however-many years. Just like a jobless recovery and dead flat incomes, the US’s GDP hasn’t moved under these years of GOP economic management (since, according to Greenspan, it’s certainly nothing he did).

So. Sinking dollar, increasing costs. All those appreciated assets (including houses), all undone. My colleague was telling me the other day that he had seen what had been instability in the nominal world, say (the world of interest rates, inflation) not defeated, just moved into the real world (the world of shit you need to buy, to eat and get to work).

Speaking of assets with questionable ‘real’ value: when is a bank a domino? Hopefully not now.

In other news, I finished my revisions, won’t get my PhD taken away from me, and can pretend for about 3 days that I never have to think again. I intend posting, at some point, something actually relevant to what I do. For now I’m just plain tired.