We have Case-Shiller at 8:30 but that’s not my main concern.
Inflation is much worse than it seems and Doug Kass made an excellent point in TheStreet.com: “Few economists or pundits have noticed that the BLS has increased the weighting of OER to 24.433% of CPI. It had been 23.158%. (Because it’s now declining?) And let’s not ignore the fact that Americans’ misery index in reality is far worse than the above official numbers indicate due to fraudulent U.S. economic statistical methodology. U.S. solons have relentlessly altered CPI, jobs data and GDP statistical methodology to obfuscate declining U.S. living standards. John Williams notes, “On the inflation front, the CPI-U annual inflation rate jumped to 2.7% (3.4% for the CPI-W)…. Adjusted to pre-Clinton (1990) methodology, annual CPI growth rose to 6.1% in December vs. 5.1% in November, while the SGS-Alternate Consumer Inflation Measure, which reverses gimmicked changes to official CPI reporting methodologies back to 1980, rose to about 9.7% (9.68% for those using the extra digit) in December vs. 8.8% in November.” Plug in the pre-Clinton or the SGS-Alternate Consumer Inflation Measure as well as a more reasonable nominal income metric — U.S. solons greatly overstate jobs and income — and the American misery index would be more in line with the palpable ire in the U.S.A.”
The whole article is a good read on CPI and the fallacy of the Owners Equivalent Rent calculation that has been keeping inflation “in check” for those fantasy consumers that are buying one of the 300,000 homes being sold in the US this year. We talked about it at length last year but it’s very nice to see it getting some attention in the MSM since we are still making policy decisions based on this nonsense. Nonsense won a victroy in California yesterday as Moody’s, S&P and Fitch won dismissal of a negligence and fraud lawsuit by two California investors who lost money on their A-rated bonds. U.S. Magistrate Judge Dale A. Drozd in Sacramento threw out the case in a ruling filed today, saying the investors’ complaint wasn’t specific enough about the alleged fraud.
Ronald Grassi, a retired California attorney, and Sally Grassi, a retired teacher, sued the New York-based companies in federal court in January 2009, claiming they gave high ratings to risky mortgage-backed bonds packaged and sold by Lehman Brothers to curry favor with the investment bank, which filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history in September 2008. The…
