The last non-farms payroll report pretty much sealed the deal in the minds of Fed watchers everywhere. We had, at last, achieved the desired degree of inflation. Rates would be going up. Probably in December.
Then, again, maybe not. Today we learn from Bloomberg:
U.S. wholesale prices unexpectedly declined in October for a second month, depressed by falling costs of food and new model light trucks. The 0.4 percent drop in the producer-price index followed a 0.5 percent decrease in September that was the biggest in eight months, Labor Department figures showed Friday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey projected a 0.2 percent gain. The gauge was down 1.6 percent from the year before, the most in records back to November 2010.
The officers of the Federal Reserve believe themselves capable of fine tuning the economy and, even, driving its direction and they increasingly conduct themselves as, in the words of Ted Cruz “a series of philosopher-kings trying to guess what’s happening with the economy.”
His solution?
A return to the gold standard. It is a measure of just how much credibility the Fed has lost that a serious candidate for the presidency could make such a proposal.
