New economy, one way or the other

Tom Lehman uswa12 at Lorainccc.edu
Fri Mar 3 10:59:26 PST 2000


Regular no-lead gasoline at the pump in this area is around $1.58-1.59. The wholesale spot price for no-lead when I looked a few minutes ago was .976 a gallon. Light Sweet crude was at $31.20. It's pretty obvious there are some fundamental problems that are being ignored by the equities markets.

Tom Lehman

Nathan Newman wrote:


> >On Behalf Of Enrique Diaz-Alvarez
> >
> > Cool! There's no inflation! And if anything goes up then we call it a
> > "sharp movement" and it doesn't count.
> > http://nypostonline.com/business/25545.htm
> >
> > Doug, are things really *this* bad at the BLS? This Crudele guy tends to
> > exaggerate;is it true that without those "ex-anything that goes up"
> > adjustments inflation would have been an annualized 12% last month?
>
> Whether this is screwy depends on why we care about inflation. If we care
> about it in order to adjust social security and other spending to help
> people pay the bills, then it's a terrible distortion.
>
> But if it's to guide monetary policy, it seems like there is more argument
> for it. At least from the Greenspan-conventional wisdom perspective, the
> fear of inflation is largely based on the fears that "excess income" by
> consumers will bid up prices and ignite an inflationary cycle. Since the
> oil price spike is completely independent of consumer actions, it does seem
> that factoring out the OPEC oil price spike makes sense for a lot of policy
> areas.
>
> -- Nathan Newman



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