Inflation by any other name – Rising rents have pushed up the CPI to highest monthly change in three years. Shifting the Fed bailouts onto the working class and poor.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) attempts to measure the change in price for a basket of American goods and services. I say attempts because measures like the “owner’s equivalent of rent†are simply an estimation as to what a home owner’s place would rent for. In the early 2000s with home prices surging, it missed […]
The math on US income – if you call something the middle make sure you are using math. The surprising details on median household income and per capita wages.
People have a hard time wrapping their minds around household and personal income.   It is an easy enough concept to understand but some throw around terminology that confuses the facts. For example $250,000 is not middle class income if we define it from a strictly mathematical model. The median household income in the US is […]
Standard of living, meet falling US dollar – how a falling US dollar benefits banks at the expense of working Americans.
There is certainly a cost to a falling US dollar. Many Americans are living the consequences of this multi-decade long trend. The Federal Reserve has only added fuel to this trend but many families are now realizing that there does come a cost to unrelenting debt based solutions to fiscal problems. Shopping at the local […]
The sound of rumbling from the student debt bubble – Jump in consumer credit last month came mostly from student debt growth. For two decades student debt expanded at a rate above 17 percent per year.
The flashing alert signs permeating from the higher education bubble should give people pause to the next flavor of the day bubble. This month information was released regarding consumer credit growth. Most of the headlines took this as positive economic news but digging deeper into the data we realize that the bulk of the growth […]