‘As it turns out, sushi prices are a fairly reliable proxy for the cost of living in a given area…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Left-wing economists have made much of the gathering storm of recession signals, blaming the policies of President Donald Trump, including his trade war with China, for the pinch on consumer purse-strings.
One former Federal Reserve official has gone so far as to encourage the top U.S. bank to crash the economy in order to force the president’s hand on trade issues—or better yet, force him out of office.
But the analysis of another Asian market—the price of sushi—tells a different tale.
The Fed—which maintained near-zero interest rates for nearly the entirety of former President Barack Obama’s term, keeping his stagnant economy on life-support, has progressively raised its rates amid the booming Trump economy.
Those rates, in turn, raise the price of everything down the line as it costs banks more to borrow money, which they then inflict on their own borrowers.
Yet, the Fed has insisted that the inflation rate has barely budged since the rate uptick.
While the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks the consumer-price index, suggests the average rate on the year is less than 2 percent, “anybody who has been to a restaurant, supermarket or paid a rent check over the past decade can tell you: Prices are rising much faster than the CPI would have you believe,” wrote ZeroHedge.
It cited the price of sushi as a novel but reliable indicator of consumer habits, more reflective than the basic staples like bread and milk listed in the CPI.
“As it turns out, sushi prices are a fairly reliable proxy for the cost of living in a given area,” said ZeroHedge, reporting on the “Sushinomics” statistics maintained by Bloomberg.
By that standard, the cost of living had increased nearly 3 percent, with some growing markets, such as Charlotte, North Carolina, seeing the cost rise as high as 6.7 percent.
The overall gap between the sushi prices and the CPI data was the highest it has been since the metric started being recorded in 2011. That 6.5 percent difference either signals that the fish morsels are becoming more valuable as a commodity or that the CPI numbers are being under-adjusted.
However, the deceitful financial games being played by deep-state bureaucrats and financial puppet-masters could prove catastrophic.
ZeroHedge said that the hidden inflation costs are literally eating into the savings of consumers, so that another major economic downturn could have nothing to cushion the blow.
President Donald Trump has severely criticized the Fed for its refusal to lower the rates, with Trump even questioning whether Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was a worse adversary for the U.S. economy than China’s Xi Jinping.
….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019