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Guest Post: Have You Noticed This Type Of Inflation
Submitted by Simon Black from Sovereign Man
Have you noticed this very deceptive form of inflation?
Every summer, my colleagues and I invite young people from all over the world for an intensive 4-day workshop about freedom and entrepreneurship.
This year’s workshop just concluded yesterday afternoon, and it was, without doubt, the best one ever.
58 students attended from countries as diverse as Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Japan, Venezuela, Singapore, Russia, the Philippines, Greece, Malaysia, Turkey, Australia, China, Belarus, Switzerland, England, Poland, Canada, the US, and many more.
These are highly motivated young people. They get it. They know that the system has completely failed them. They know that the old path of ‘study hard, get into a good school, get a good job, work your way up the ladder, and retire’ is no longer valid for their generation.
They understand that they will not be able to count on their governments for anything. They realize that they only have themselves to rely on. They’re eager to learn, and to execute.
The experience of helping shape these sharp young minds is truly invigorating. And for many of the students, it can be life changing.
Something interesting happened this year, though.
For the past several years, we have been conducting this event at a lovely resort in the Lithuanian countryside. It’s a pretty place– a nice, comfortable, relaxing environment away from all the noise and distraction of daily life.
Now, I pay for the whole thing myself. I rent out the entire resort and pick up the total cost of food, lodging, entertainment, etc. For this year’s event, my staff was able to negotiate the same price as last year, and I was happy about this.
But after the first two days, we began to notice something different: the resort was actually skimping out on our food portions!
In other words, they kept the price the same as last year… but they were delivering less value than before. In this case, it was in the form of food portions that were at least 10% smaller!
(Needless to say, we rectified this by ordering several dozen pizzas… followed by a very candid conversation with the resort’s General Manager.)
This is an example of something that I see all over the world. It’s a shadow form of inflation that I call ‘value deflation’.
You see, most people think that inflation is really all about price, i.e. paying X% more this year than last year. But this is merely one version of inflation.
At its core, inflation is loss of purchasing power. This can mean an increase in price for the same amount of stuff, or it can mean a decrease in the amount of stuff for the same price.
I see many signs of both all over the world as I travel.
Price inflation is obvious. We all know when we’re paying more because we see the price tag. When the price of food or fuel goes up, in fact, it can even result in sticker shock.
Value deflation, on the other hand, is far more deceptive. Most people aren’t that closely attuned to realize that their portions are getting smaller, that their ‘extras’ are going away, etc. We didn’t notice until our stomachs started growling.
Value deflation is not taught at university economics courses; you’ll never hear any of these Nobel economists or central bankers mention it. Stiglitz, Krugman, and Bernanke all happily tow the line that ‘there is no inflation’ because the price of iPads keeps going down.
These are the people who have the power to influence policy and conjure trillions of dollars out of thin air… and it’s amazing how easily they can hide the truth from people through this shadow inflation.
Curiously, this is what passes as a free society today. It is a truly, truly bizarre system.
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"Value deflation" as you call it is all the rage in the global beer markets through something called "bottle miniaturization". I actually don't think it happens in the US so much, but in Europe beer bottles have gone from being a standard ~330ml to on average much smaller, with no corresponding drop in price.
But, I guess when the end user doesn't notice or mind the value deflation, what's the harm? You just have to be careful they will be ok with it when they do find out...
Bullshit/
I am in downtown Berlin and came in today from Rostock. I don;t know how many people I saw with biers, most sitting in sidewalk cafes with draft bier, but hundreds just today and very early in the morning too with a bottle of beir. One guy I noticed because he was at a sidewalk cafe with a small bottle of Becks. Wierd everybody seems to drink the house draft unless they are walking around. The standard bottle her is 0.5litres. At the grocery store a 20 bottle case is 12Euro, What smaller bottles. JUNK
Have you noticed this type of inflation?
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LOL! About the only thing I could use the FED for is to keep my inflation/deflation balanced.
Ah....Hello?
Author - Did you just land here?
Never grocery shop?
This has been troubling consumers for quite a while now.
Geez.
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If this keeps up, Simon, next harvest's quota of Quechua daughters won't nearly be up to snuff!
They better find some llamas, or the sun won't come back!
ok so you got the same price as last year but the food was smaller...
right so you just assumed that inflation was at 0% .. basically instead of passing the costs off upfront they have just given you a slightly smaller meal retard, so they could keep the price the same.. im failing to see where this is a problem, they could just have put the price up by inflation.
and even more interesting...... is purchasing half a stone of potatoes at market only to later discover more than half of said potatoes have black bits in the middle. This i believe is a truly sordid stealth inflation affecting us all.. and trulty deserving of further research in a fully flegdged ZH article.
Be subtle and call it "the bedtime story" cause no fucker will get passed the first paragraph without falling asleep...............
"Dropkick me jesus through the gateposts of life"
YES, I NOTICED THIS MANY YEARS AGO, AND HAVE READ NUMEROUS ARTICLES AND BLOG POSTS ON IT.
I HEREBY DEMOTE YOU, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS, DOWN TO BUCK PRIVATE OBVIOUS.
(and yes, my caps lock key works just fine.)
The thinking I am having is the peoples who were being the cookers of your foods were seeing much fatness in your belly and were having thinking about doing the things that would be being better for you.
Everyone seems to be missing the main points of this article. Here, let me help you guys out:
"For the past several years, we have been conducting this event at a lovely resort in the Lithuanian countryside." = Hey!!! Look at me!!! I am in Lithuania now!!! What a globe trotter I am!!!
"Now, I pay for the whole thing myself. I rent out the entire resort and pick up the total cost of food, lodging, entertainment, etc." = I am much richer AND more generous, magnanimous, philanthropic, etc. than you are!!!
Yeah......that's pretty much it. Yawn.
Always funny when US citizens fake discovering US citizen economics...
And this from a travelled US citizen, best.
Evidently this guy has not bought a "half gallon" of ice cream in he last ten years.
amerika
won't admit inflation until
the size of the 100 $ bill
is reduced....
I had a $100 bill tatooed on my penis so when my girlfriends were blowing $100, I at least enjoyed it. Sadly, with age, it's shrunk to $10 and now I have to pay $100 to have it serviced...oh the humanity!
They know that the old path of is no longer valid for their generation.
That's great to hear that some young people still have their eyes and minds open.
Now, I pay for the whole thing myself. I rent out the entire resort and pick up the total cost of food, lodging, entertainment, etc. For this year’s event, my staff was able to negotiate the same price as last year, and I was happy about this.
Simon I think you made a small mistake here. If you do host this conference in fact (doubtful) then actually you pay for nothing. The suckers who buy into your soveriegn man BS are the ones paying.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/working-class-mens-wages-have-plummeted-over-past-40-years
Why work hard when you won't even get rewarded for it (minus self-fulfillment...which doesn't pay bills)?
Corporogummint fascists pretend to pay us and we pretend to work?
FraudVille, bitchez!!!!111
I knew that when the toilet paper tube got bigger and bigger and the roll of paper got smaller and smaller, that we were in trouble.
Greata article, BTW. Thanks.
Yeah. It also got narrower (shorter?) as well and I had to start putting PVC pipe mandrels into the tubes to make sure they still stayed on the damn holders. Yeeeeesssh! Butt floss TP! Who woulda thunk it?
Black’s article reminds me of a quote from Usury in Money Manipulation and Social Order:
“One party to the loan-contract, the Central Bank in control of the issue of credit-money, thus retains the power (by a twist of the credit-screw) to alter the value of the currency as a measure of things saleable. This is the same as if a man sells a horse to another, and at the same time retains the power to change the animal into a mule or a donkey in a fortnight or whenever it suits him.” IE - Butt floss TP!
Are you referring to Obama or Romney?
Good one! I knew it was hard to tell the difference.
So this is why we are running out of toilet paper often: the rols have less paper. At east now I can tell my wife it's not because I more full of shit than usual.
People need to study history more I guess. Gold and silver coins have been getting clipped and the fineness jocked for millennia. Crack a book or ipad.
Hey we can cut gasoline prices by reducing the size of a gallon a little bit each year, and raise CAFE standards too. (nobody will notice).
Hey lets introduce 240 sq ft "apartments".
Hey lets ban large drinks (and raise small drink prices).
Riiight! Let’s get Mayor Bloomberg onto it and rather than less-for-more, let’s ban it or hide it… He's got Big Gulp experience... That’ll take care of any upcoming shortages as the USA ushers in its new Bloombergesque Socialist policies of purge and terror. As David Kramer wrote on the LRC Blog: Nazi Bloomberg Wants to Stay Abreast of Things . Wrote Kramer:
______________________________
Now the Nazi Mike Bloomberg wants NYC hospitals to hide(!!) baby formula bottles from mothers giving birth in the hospitals in order to force encourage them to breast feed.
"Mayor Bloomberg is pushing hospitals to hide their baby formula behind locked doors so more new mothers will breast-feed. Starting Sept. 3, the city will keep tabs on the number of bottles that participating hospitals stock and use — the most restrictive pro-breast-milk program in the nation. Under the city Health Department’s voluntary [emphasis mine] Latch On NYC initiative, 27 of the city’s 40 hospitals have also agreed to give up swag bags sporting formula-company logos, toss out formula-branded tchotchkes like lanyards and mugs, and document a medical reason for every bottle that a newborn receives."
"Voluntary" for now. I'll bet you that Nazi Bloomberg will eventually get the guns of his government to either ban baby formula outright from hospitals or create such heavy regulations and paperwork in order for the mother to get "permission" to use baby formula that it will be a tacit outright ban anyway. …
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/
The “key” to Stalinesque economics, of course, is centralization and layers of bureaucracy; the downfall, of course, is it topples by the sheer weight of its unwieldy structure as was happening in the U.S.S..R. when Stalin died in 1953. Sound familiar?
fuck me sideways!!! americans will comment on anything..I have never in my life read as vacuous an article as that.. How about "ZH knitting guide" for the more adventurous amongst us....
It’s called oppression.
With passage of the Federal Reserve Act, Congress anchored us to unreality and instability. It allowed the bankers to deliberately and intentionally vary the value – the purchasing power – of money and, thus, the price of goods, resulting in booms and busts. “The rise of prices in the first stage swindles all creditors for the benefit of the debtors. The fall of prices in the second swindles all debtors for the sake of creditors (Promises to Pay).”
The bankers make profits both ways.
As Churchill said in 1932: “Look at the gross unfairness of such distortion to all producers of new wealth, and to all that labour and science and enterprise can give us.”
The definition of a monetary system that intentionally involves inflation and deflation is financial terrorism.
It's only inflation if they call it inflation, it's only fraud if they call it fraud... blah blah blah
Its one big fucking racket with exactly one message fronted by the incorporated --
"FUCK THE POOR!"
He had to order pizzas from a resort he rented out, to realize this ???
simon black simon black
I'll read your shite when i need a nap
these value deflations sometimes lead to unexpected results like the following one in lithuania
at the same shop the same milk 1 litre package was labeled at lower price than packaged in 0.9 litre package
I figured this out when I was taking a shit a while back and noticed that the width of the toilet paper had shrunk by half. I didn't need to go to Lithuania, for fuck's sake.
Even our fonts are getting smaller :(
Next we'll be told that the good ladies at my favourite website www.ExtremeHornyBitchesInLeather.com are in fact wearing cheap PVC...
Every summer my buddies and I invite social losers from all over the East side for an intensive party about freedom and pissing in public. This year’s party just concluded yesterday afternoon, and it was, without doubt, the most awesome ever.
158 rejects attended from areas as diverse as the homeless shelter, Ziggy’s Bike Bar, the work-release center, Wal-Mart parking lot, free clothing center, the Greyhound Bus depot, and many more.
These dipshits are seriously fucked up. They don’t get it. They do know the old path of ‘live free, ride hard’ is no longer valid for their generation. Living free went to shit with the Welfare Reform crusade back in the Reagan administration, and riding hard hurts their ass.
The experience of partying with these ruined minds is truly bizarre. And for many of the derelicts nothing will ever change their hopeless lives.
Something interesting happened this year, though.
For the past several years, we have been holding this party in the former parking lot of the abandoned Zap Pickle factory. It’s a hellhole – a polluted, litter-strewn brownscape amid all the noise and distraction of the city’s worst neighborhood . . .
Where has this guy been......I' ve seen this at all the local supermarkets here...Winn Dixie, Publix, Super Walmart, Super Target, Food Lion...for about 4 years now.
And he's just now getting around to buying his own food?
Shrinkage. Been going on for a long time. More air, less product. Big box but half full. Whipped products all puffed up with air. Inert or mostly harmless material mixed in. Grade B or C instead of A. 100% real fruit juice, but not the juice on the label. New concentrated formula, that costs more than the old diluted with usless crap formula, but really works out to the same amount of useful product.
I noticed the other day that my Orville Redenbacher Natural Lime and Salt popcorn bag had only about HALF the amount of popcorn as last time I bought it, when it was done popping.
Everything from diapers to toothpaste and toilet paper and every kind of food product is getting smaller and thinner even as the prices continue upward.
Bullshit inflation is less than 2%.
This has beengoing on for a while. About 2 years ago I notices the Orange Juice sold at Supermarkets is now in 59 oz containers . Used to be in 64 containers . However the price is the same
I wrote to Minute Maid and complained. They wrote back with some bs but they did send me 6 coupons for a dollar off. so the bottom line is you can get 6 bucks in coupons from Minute Maid simply by writing a complaing email. Normally I wou;d feel bad about clipping them for 6 bucks but since they would not admit the cause was rising costs and inflation, I figure they dieserve to get clipped. So complain to minute maid , get some coupons.
Generally I click on on these articles just to confirm that they have been wrritten by the self-important bore "whatshisname". I am sure he has little-people with him everywhere he goes to inform people who he is.
Smaller portions are a feature! You should pay more for that.
Last millenia, I stayed at a jungle "elder hostel" when my planned accommodations in Costa Rica did not work out (I'm still not ready for the elder part).
The meals were exceptionally healthy. Anticipating the challenge, I asked "Can I have more chicken?" at the non-self-serve buffet.
"No!".
Apparently, it was one of the rules. People were paying to be treated like that.
I to have noticed this, not with food as such. But in the quailty of certian product lines in my business, instead of my suppliers increasing prices the quailty of a high number of product lines have dropped dramatically.
They've been doing this for years. Have you seen how much a pound of coffee weighs nowadays?