According to new data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, price inflation in December rose again to a new multidecade high, rising to the highest level recorded in nearly forty years. According to the Consumer Price Index for December, year-over-year price inflation rose to 7.1 percent. It hasn’t been that high since June 1982, when the growth rate was at 7.2 percent.
During a confirmation hearing with the US Senate this week, Fed chairman Jerome Powell was asked about whether or not a digital currency issued by a central bank could exist side by side with private cryptocurrencies. Powell responded that there is nothing that would prevent private cryptos from “coexisting” with a “digital dollar.”
This, of course, is obviously true so long as federal regulators do not decide to ban the usage of cryptocurrencies.
No institution is exempt from the American public’s growing distrust of the federal government. Even the military, which has traditionally enjoyed broad support from Americans of all political stripes, is now seeing its otherwise pristine image take a hit.
Seems strange that as of December 30, 2021, Turkey’s central bank was carrying a loss of $5.2 billion USD; then on the last day of the year it miraculously made $10 billion, closing the year with a gain of $4.4 billion USD. Was it a lucky break or just an accounting trick?
As reported by AlJazeera:
The central bank declined to comment on the dramatic move on its balance sheet…
When assailing global governance, pundits rarely comment on its impact on small countries. Yet the degree to which small countries are ignored by global institutions—like the G7, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—helps to illustrate how institutions of global governance tend to primarily reflect the values of managerial elites from large and wealthy states.
Economists have illuminated our understanding of guilds in medieval Europe, but we still know rather little about their functions in other parts of the world, especially Africa. In the West, the approach has been to question the relevance of guilds as a platform to accentuate economic growth.
Income inequality in Latin America is appallingly high, with the richest 10 percent of the population controlling 54 percent of national income.
Some commentators attribute the latest sharp increase in the Consumer Price Index to businesses pushing prices of goods higher in order to secure higher profits. (See the New York Times article “Democrats Blast Corporate Profits as Inflation Surges,” January 3, 2022). Note that the yearly growth rate of the Consumer Price Index jumped to 6.8 percent in November 2021 from 1.2 percent the year before.
