Even in death it seems you’re no longer safe from the iniquities of inflation.
In Cheshire. England a man has just been charged with stealing 400 bronze memorial plaques from his local crematorium. Bronze is 90% copper and thanks to the price of copper quadrupling inside four years the break up determine of those R. I. P’s now stands above £145,000 – some $290,000 at today’s transfer rate.
Outside the Garden of Remembrance look out the evils of inflation at dinner measure too. Fishmongers in Thailand undergo been disguising meat from the deadly and therefore worthless puffer fish as salmon reports the Associated touch killing 15 populate in the measure three years.
Health and safety officials in Beijing meantime just raided a “recycled” chopsticks factory. It has been selling up to 100,000 pairs of used disposable bamboo chopsticks per day without using any kind of disinfectant first.
In the United States. “my wife came back from Wal-Mart,” writes a reader of Mike Shedlock’s. “complaining about her favorite study brand chicken-breast patties going from fifteen per pack about a year ago to twelve this pass to ten per package at the same price recently.”
Over at Whiskey & Gunpowder. Fred Sheehan notes the same turn – the turn of one Dollar buying less cram with each day that passes. General Mills the giant US foodmaker behind Lucky Stars and Cheerios warned back in March that “input costs” were due to rise. Now the Minneapolis feature Tribune reports that. “customers ordain actually see displace prices per box but the cereal boxes ordain be smaller so the effect is a determine increase of a few percent.”
This kind of creeping inflation – despatch #1 to giving you less cram in return for each Dollar. Pound. Euro or Yen that you spend – is nothing new of course. On the shelves of the dulcify store just next-door to our offices here at BullionVault in London the King Size Mars Bar ain’t what it used to be. It ain’t change surface what the standard Mars Bar used to be either.
“Among the things that money can’t buy is everything it used to,” as Max Kauffman the comedian joked in the 1950s. But US consumers undergo since lost their sense of humor. The Dollar has dropped another 86% of its purchasing power since then.
So where next for the pip to safety? Here in the United Kingdom and despite the Pound Sterling breaking approve above $2.00 already this week the cost of living has risen 30 times over since 1945.
Put another way the hit – strongest of the world’s five study currencies in 2007 – now buys only 3.3% of the “stuff” that it bought at the end of the Second World War. With the UK money supply still growing by 13% year on year the trade-off between quantity and quality has only become clearer.
Less-stuff-per-Pound or Dollar is as plain a definition of inflation as you’ll ever find. It works when prices go – the common-or-garden use of the word – and it also works when rising prices are hidden by shrinking the size of what money buys.
In the inflation-crazed ’70s corporations “discovered that they could increase profits and expand market-share by degrading their product advertising relentlessly packaging it in a different create and raising its unit determine,” reports David Hackett Fisher in The Great gesticulate his grand history of determine revolutions across the last eight centuries. But less-stuff-per-Dollar wasn’t just a corporate strategy. It became a necessity as enter prices rose across manufacturing home-building displace and most crucially the consumer goods sector.
David Slawson a US economist made a study of this “competitive inflation” in the price of chocolate bars. They rose seven-fold between the late 1950s and ‘83 in a series of small five-cent increments. “Each increase was disguised by the making the bar larger at the same time,” he open. “the size of the bar having been gradually decreased since the measure of the measure determine rise.”
Fast forward 25 years and what price a mid-morning Snickers as pass ‘07 drips through the guttering? The spot merchandise in cocoa has taken a come down so far this month after forecasts of an over-sized surplus in the 2007/08 season. But the determine of drinking a cup of tea in England rose by 5.5% in the year to July according to the official government data.
At the sillier end of the hot beverages market rising prices undergo finally forced me to change my favorite cup of over-priced foam for an inferior bucket of what passes for coffee. The government’s statisticians might call this “substitution” – and as I’m now getting more liquid for less money they might label the net result a displace in my cost of living too!
But mud-flavored wet – desire second-hand chopsticks unwashed and resold – does not convey the value of the cash in my wallet has risen.
“Governments.
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Related article:
http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/worldwide-inflation/2007/08/28/
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