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Distressing inflation news keeps rolling in…

Multiple comments from senior federal officials indicate we are going to have inflation for a while.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen indicated inflation will continue into 2022.

She indicates the source of inflation is bottlenecks that have themselves generated inflation. Unstated in the article, and apparently unacknowledged by Secretary Yellen, this these bottlenecks are caused by the government shutting down the economy and in their staggering hubris thinking they can flip a switch and seamlessly open up the economy.

CNBC – 10/5/21 – Yellen sees inflation staying higher for the next several months.

Article also points out Fed chairman Powell called inflation news last week “frustrating.” I suppose so. When you think you can control the economy of the world with a few keystrokes from your laptop, such news would be quite frustrating.

Most unsettling tidbits in the article are the estimates from the Federal Open Market Committee that inflation measured by the PCE will be 3.7% in 2021. THey think it will be lower next year. I hope so.

St. Louis Fed President predicts 2.8% for the full year of 2022.

Few days ago we discussed the Personal Consumption Expenditure for August 2021 shows ongoing inflation.

The August number of 0.4% increase results in a year-over-year increase of 4.3%. Bad news is this is the highest increase in PCE since 1991, all the way back when Pres. Bush was in office.  That is a 30-year high in the inflation rate as measured by PCE.

A bit more on that high inflation rate seen in August PCE.Read More »

Looks like there is another flood of reporting ready to appear in print on bank secrecy and hiding wealth.

This project will be called the Pandora Papers.

If you recall, a major series of reports back in the 2016 timeframe described money laundering efforts flowing through one particular law firm in Panama. You can read my comments on the coverage.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) brought together around 600 journalists from about 150 media outlets to analyze a data leak with 2.94 TB of info. That’s terabytes, as in thousands of gigabytes.

The ICIJ kickoff summary was published on 11/3/21: Pandora Papers: An offshore data tsunami.

If you are at all interested in offshore banking, or money laundering, or the world-far-away of hiding or relocating wealth even without nefarious intent, you will want to pay attention.

Looks like there will be a lot of coverage, what with 330 politicians and 130 people on the Forbes billionaire list showing up in the data.

From a first glance, it looks like this project have as one focus the structure of banks and professionals that service this market.

The Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) inflation index again shows an increase of 0.4% in August 2021 after increasing the same in July. Since December 2020 this index has shown inflation of between 0.3% and 0.6% each month.

This indicates that inflation is continuing. Good news is that inflation is slowing, declining from 0.6% in March and April, to 0.5% in May and June, to 0.4% in July and August.

Bad news is annualizing the running three month inflation rate shows between 4% and 7% since February.

Personal Consumption Expenditure for August 2021 shows ongoing inflation.Read More »