Thursday, April 28, 2011

Gas Prices are Lower

At the first-ever Fed press conference yesterday (thanks Ron Paul), Ben Bernanke referred to inflation only in the context of the managed Consumer Price Index.  Never once did he utter the word "gold."  Investors noticed the omission and expressed their concern acccordingly. 

From the NY Sun, April 27, 2011:

Even as the chairman was speaking, the economist David Malpass pointed out in a telegram this afternoon, the dollar lost value, dropping to a 1,529th of an ounce of gold. Yet not a word about gold at the press conference. Call it the dog that didn’t bark. The chairman spoke of the high cost of gas without once acknowledging that the price of gasoline is lower in value — meaning it takes less gold or silver to buy it — than it did at, say, the start of President Obama’s term. The president seemed oblivious to this irony when he spoke in his radio address over the weekend of how there is no “silver bullet” that will deal with the soaring gas prices.

What the silver price actual shows is that it’s not the gasoline that’s going up but the dollar that’s going down. So it’s just bizarre for Mr. Bernanke to be talking of a “strong and stable” dollar, which he did, Mr. Malpass pointed out, three times in the press conference. The result is what Mr. Malpass called “a disconnect between the rhetoric and the policy” because “the dollar is neither strong nor stable and the U.S. hasn’t supported it.” Said Mr. Malpass, a former official under President Reagan: “For years, Treasury and the Fed have acted as if the current value of the dollar qualifies as “strong and stable.” This severely undercuts the credibility of Treasury and the Fed on the dollar.”

1 comment:

1389 said...

Yes, fuel prices ARE too high, even in view of the fact that Obama has been trashing the value of the US dollar. And there IS something that we can do. It starts with putting the blame exactly where it belongs, on Obama and his administration, and keeping it there.

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