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To: LS

Best post yet.


18 posted on 08/29/2015 5:30:20 AM PDT by paulcissa (The first requirement of Liberalism is to stand on your head and tell the world they're upside down)
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To: paulcissa
Thanks. One of the weirdest things about where we are now is that we have (supposedly) all this debt. "The world is drowning in debt.") Ok, so where are the traditional symptoms of that debt? If the Fed has printed so damn much money, we shouldn't have a LITTLE bit of inflation in food, some products, but massive, double-digit, hyper-inflation. Can't see it anywhere. Gold, silver, other commodities? Nuthin. Energy. Nuthin. If anything the price of energy is collapsing.

China's devaluation is one small sign of inflation---who knows? Maybe it's the first big sign.

But (and I'm no economist, which is probably a good thing) I've been working on a theory for about 10 years, namely that we haven't begun to pump the money supply up to where it has caught up to REAL productivity gains.

Traditional measurements of productivity used to go like this: you have a rotary phone selling for $40. Now a new phone comes along, dials faster, better audio, and it sells for $50. That's a productivity increase of more than 20%. (or, say, you can sell it for $30 but sell more, however you want to measure the traditional productivity increases of output per hour).

But here comes a cell phone. This isn't just a phone though. It's a camera, a calculator, a GPS, a game, a video device, a calorie counter, and on and on. So you can't just say it's productivity increase is x over a phone. You would have to add ALL the previous functions it now does and factor in THAT productivity. How much time, for example, do people spend working on planes because now they have iPad/laptop capability? How much business time do you spend in your car talking on your phone, how much do you save by not pulling over reading maps, etc?

In short, we may have had a phenomenal technological revolution that the "traditional" accounting measures haven't yet caught up to, and if so, the money supply has, in fact, lagged behind. Say it's been a $17 TRILLION increase over the past 10 years . . . .?

37 posted on 08/29/2015 7:33:09 AM PDT by LS ("Castles Made of Sand, Fall in the Sea . . . Eventually" (Hendrix))
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