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PriceStats - The Beginning Of The End For BLS Data Manipulation?
Had enough of neverending BLS inflation data manipulation? You may be in luck. Hot on the heels of the MIT Billion Prices Project (which we were delighted to see recently came back on line), there now is... PriceStats, potentially the most revolutionary concept to come to the fielf of econometrics, and thus fiscal and monetary policy in ages.
From the launch press release:
The BPP is proud to announce the launch of PriceStats, a start-up based in Cambridge MA with the mission of becoming a leading source of daily inflation statistics around the world.
PriceStats will allow the BPP to focus on research and continue
innovating in the field of real-time price statistics. Our research team
will have access to a greater amount of data than ever before, which
will be collected, processed, and shared by PriceStats for use in our
research initiatives and experimental indices. In addition, this
arrangement will allow the BPP to continue publishing the daily US
inflation and World inflation indices on a monthly basis.
PriceStats has partnered with State Street Global Markets
to update daily inflation series in more than 40 countries through
their client research portal, IR3. If you would like more information on
how to access these series, please contact the PriceStats team at
contact@pricestats.com.
PriceStats is a young company and the team is growing fast. If you
are interested in technology and economics, and would like to join the
team, please email careers@pricestats.com
We hope at least a year passes before the Federal Reserve decides to LBO PriceStats. Alternatively, the involvement of State Street while admirable, gives one pause to wonder if there will not be a sudden short stock recall causing a massive inflationary surge once the custodian company flexes its short squeeze muscles, so eloquently demonstrated back in March 2009 when the glimmers of the "profit and earnings ratio" rally was in desperate nee of a Citi group short squeeze.
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Who cares? This is the salad days of employers. Rank and file wil never be lower!!
This economy is running on empty.
Contrary Investor…
“First, remember that disposable income is after tax personal income, so we need to bring taxes into the equation. Secondly, the glaring omission in the paragraph above looking at the components of personal income was government transfer payments. From the fourth quarter of 2007, government transfer payments to individuals have increased by approximately $540 billion. Additionally, government tax receipts from individuals since 4Q 2007 have declined by $217 billion. Bottom line being, of the $895.5 billion increase in US disposable (after-tax) personal income since year end 2007, just shy of $760 billion is made up of an increase in government transfer payments and a reduction in government personal tax receipts. You already know this was entirely funded with increases in US national debt.
“So the key here is that since year end 2007, 85% of the increase in US disposable personal income has been driven by some sort of Government stimulus. And of course the key question looking ahead is whether or not this is sustainable?"
http://www.contraryinvestor.com/mo.htm
i think that pricestats (if it is what it says) would be a nice step forward.
Vapourware - or worse - adware. Disappointing for ZH.
As to inflation, there is no such thing. Can of beans is worth today what it was worth yesterday, and the day before that. It's MONEY that loses it's value.
Inflation is the great economic fraud. It doesn't exist. Paper money may lose it's value (and hence it is a form of theft), but goods and services retain theirs, regardless of the 'price'.
The more indebted the society, the faster the paper money loses it's value.
"the more indebted the society, the fast paper money loses value"
.now you tell us.
ok: a while back i reported that radioactive strawberries were $3.99/lb, buy1/get1 free @ spaceway.
today, same store: 2 lb pkg for $2.97. but, they didn't look fresh. so, when the guys came back from their break, i asked if they had any fresh ones. oh, yes! and he sends the other guy to get me one. i wait a few minutes and tell the other guy i am gonna go look at the dead meat markdowns to see if i can afford to eat. be right back.
"yes, sir!" so, i get back a few minutes later, and i see they guy who went for my fresh strawbs, but i don't see the strawbs. i look @ him; i look @ the strawbs; &tc. he sez: "i got them for you, but somebody else came by and took them." if it weren't for zH trolls, i woulda lost it, right there! so the other guy comes by and sez: "would you like me to get you some?" i'm fuking speechless! so, no more checking out the women or the meat or anything, i just wait and the guy comes right back and hands me the prettiest 2lbs of strawbs in the state of californication.
i say: are these as radioactive as the ones you had last month?
he sez: are we gonna get into that?
i told him we were downwind from the japanese 4-banger and i just wanted to make sure i was getting my money's worth, here.
he sez: "yeah.......i...know..."
so, i thanked him for all his help and left him w/ the 24 lbs of strawbs that shoulda been in the dumpster compared with the beauties i had in my little tisket tasket basket.
deflation, right? free iodine isotopes, too!
or: is this a seasonal adjustment? the prices always go down as the strawbs come in and i should compare them y-to-y?
econometrics, indeed!
UCB Food Chain Sampling Results | The Nuclear Engineering Department At UC Berkeley
"In the tables below, we are providing two numbers for each of the isotopes. The first is a standard concentration unit of Becquerel per kilogram (Bq/kg) which is the number of particles decaying per second in each kilogram of the sample. The number in parentheses after the activity is the number of kilograms that one would need to consume to equal the radiation exposure of a single round trip flight from San Francisco to Washington D.C. (0.05 mSv). For more information on how this equivalent dose is calculated, the details are here: How Effective Dose is Calculated"
You people probably know this, but just in case. The above from the UCB link, is pure junk science. What needs to be calculated is the internal exposure to the radioactive isotopes. Of course. I mean, why would you pretend that you're not going to eat the strawberries, but instead stand beside them for the duration of a transcontinental flight? NO, you eat the fucking strawberries, with the radioactive isotopes in them, they go down into your intestinal track, they get absorbed into your metabolism, they lodge somewhere, depending on the isotope. For instance, Cessium goes to the muscles mostly, Strontium goes to the bones. They stay there, lodged snugly next to a circle of cells and they emit radiation for years and years, which knocks off electrons from your DNA, which causes cancer and a horrible, painful, nightmarish death. This is a bit different then being in an airplane, is it not? So why would UCB put junk science risk assesstment on its engineering site? Well,,,, let's see, who's the US secretary of energy promoting nuclear energy, and where did he work before Obummer bin lyin appointed him to his nefarious post? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Chu
There are also links to document that this junk risk assessment for radiation exposure was formulated years ago by the nuclear industry, miliary mostly, to spread "atoms for peace" nuclear energy, which would make nuclear weapons seem a little bit more sane, tolerable. Guess which country was one of the first to be persuaded by our nuclear maniacs to build reactors? Yes, right, the most geologic unstable little island in the world, and, hey, why not build them right smack on the earthquake faults?
Here's one for the radioactive flow from Japan to us here on the west coast of "the land of the free", and then on to the rest of the northern hemisphere. You need to let it download for a minute or so. It's from the Eurad site, developed to monitor convert nuclear testing, and I've linked the surface Ce 137 flow. Locate the area between Vancouver and LA to see where it hits. You're viewing it as though your looking down from above the northern hemisphere. Locate the time chronology on top of the flow chart, it starts on 15/3/11, progressing in UTC time. To summarize, we're breathing, eating, and inhaling radioactive isotopes, but, don't worry, it's safe, like flying in an airplane. More insanity from our beserk leaders. Internal radiation exposure doesn't exist from constant nuclear fallout. The same beserk mentality that can believe that giving all the wealth of the planet, and I mean all of it, the land, food, water, all life, all thought, and all commodities to a bunch of greedy psychopaths is good national policy. It's all the same shit.
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weather/news/fukushima?LANG=en&VAR=eurads...
another link on risk assessment.
http://www.counterpunch.org/busby03282011.html
I wonder how long it will take before they are co-opted, regulated and controlled. In the mean time ...
"but these numbers contain food and energy and these are highly volatile, so best left out. Their numbers are a distortion of the truth"
Boring and irrelevant.
Every skilled Central Banker knows that true inflation numbers must not have food and energy prices.
Louis Woodhill’s “Ten Secret Warning Signs of Inflation" (Forbes)…
During his press conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that one of the Fed’s big concerns was that inflation was too low. He revealed that the Fed bases this contention on an index of “core inflation,” which excludes food and energy costs.
“Core inflation” is mainly of interest to Americans who don’t eat and don’t drive. Others will be more concerned with broader inflation measures, such as the CPI-U. However, over the years, the government has modified the CPI-U to reduce the reported rate of inflation. Economist John Williams has noted that if the CPI-U were calculated the same way that it was calculated in 1980, the year-over-year inflation rate reported for March 2011 would have been 10.20% rather than the “official” 2.68% number.
How can a citizen know what is really happening on the inflation front, given that the government seems to be trying to hide the truth? Watch for these ten secret inflation warning signs:
1. You are filling your car up with gas and you notice that the “price per gallon” digits are going up faster than the “gallons” numbers.
2. McDonalds announces that they are freezing the price of their most popular burger, but that they are renaming it the “Quarter Ouncer.”
3. You go to a restaurant in San Diego, and you are relieved to find that the prices on the menu look like bargains. Then you realize that they are denominated in pesos.
4. The Fed announces that they are now basing policy on a new price statistic called “Core Core Inflation”. This new price index excludes food, energy, and everything that went up in price that month.
5. Procter & Gamble complains that the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing is competing unfairly with “Charmin.”
6. People with silver fillings are afraid to smile.
7. The Fed’s Quantitative Easing XLVI arrives before Super Bowl XLVI.
8. Street beggars start demanding euros.
9. Airlines begin requiring that passengers bring their own jet fuel.
10. The Fed announces that they are going to be basing policy on an even newer price index, called “Core Core Core Inflation”. This one excludes everything.
Now that you know what to look out for, you won’t have to worry about being caught unawares by inflation.
http://blogs.forbes.com/louiswoodhill/2011/05/04/the-ten-secret-warning-signs-of-inflation/
So will the boys at MIT just buy a subscription to http://www.shadowstats.com/ for $175 a year? and input those numbers? or do they have one girl inputing numbers and then another on the other side uploading them into the system?
or did they C+ it all and no human interaction is needed? jobs creation be damned?
I still haven't seen any good, reasoned, empirical evidence that CPI is deliberate manipulation. The idea that real inflation is 10% is rightly insane to any non nutjob who actually lived through the seventies. I've read many many papers on why CPI data is adjusted to account for numerous other factors (in fact, not accounting for these factors is dishonest, and the only reason I can see for doing so is for ideological conveniance), yet I haven't seen a single analyst show or explain why these adjustments are wrong. Almost everyone I have seen complaining is either clearly an idealogical ranter or relying on extremely limited anecdotes.