The latest campaign issue (and source of distraction from the underlying problem) is the ever-increasing price of gasoline. Always eager to find a boogie man to lay blame upon the politicians and talking heads are again leveling their sights on market speculation as the primary cause of the problem, coupled with domestic refiners exporting product to overseas markets where prices are even higher than paid here for gasoline.
Yes speculation and export rates (as a percentage of total production) do have an impact on the price we see at the pump, but looking at these two factors in isolation does a disservice to the consumer and the voter and ignores the underlying problem of inflation and what is causing it.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the pontifications of the Federal Reserve and their wholly owned subsidiaries in Washington and in the MSM that so-called “core” inflation is ”minimal” is nothing more than a propagandistic lie.
Quite simply oil is a global market and it’s not that the price is rising as much as that the value of the US dollar in that market is shrinking. Nations all over are actively seeking ways to escape the “petro dollar” and finding other mediums of exchange in which to conduct the oil trade.
The US Federal Reserve continues with its disastrous Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP), and perpetual buying of Treasury Bonds to finance an ever-expanding national debt. The Europeans just simply crank up the printing press to finance the never ending bailouts of the PIIGS and accompany it by replacing elected democratic governments with unelected and unelectable banking technocrats. Then on both sides of the pond these elitists can’t figure out why their own populations start grumbling about fascism and foreign states are dumping their bonds and seek to find other ways to conduct trade.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Barac Obama are one the same page blaming speculators and not government collectivist centralization of control of free markets you might as well just bend over and grab your ankles because they are going to stick it to you deep and hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are of course welcome. Please stay on topic. Comments with links to commercial sites unrelated to the post or the general theme of this blog will be deleted as spam.