I blame those greedy public sectors workers myself. I've heard some of them actually expect to eat twice a day.
Real inflation at 9.5%, says Telegraph
In the privatised utility sector I work in, we've just turned down a one year 5% pay offer by a three to one majority. In truth, there's not much appetite for a strike at the moment but considerable anger about the cost of living.
I suspect that the unions, who were initially angry with the vote and then suddenly very militant, will go for a two year deal. This is usually a union stitch up (see the tanker driver's settlement).
If the telegraph- a right wing paper are reporting that real inflation is 9.5% then I'm tempted to think it's more than that
If this was the seventies then inflation problems would have been freely reported and blamed on the labour government and trade unions
in reality the banks/business/ capitalists are to blame for inflation
this news item is just covering up the reality of the situation, it must be much worse
In the States according to the Wall Street Journal:
Quote:
The price index for personal consumption expenditures excluding energy and food -- a gauge of inflation watched closely by the Federal Reserve -- rose at a 2.3% pace, above the 1.5%-to-2% range that the Fed considers price stability.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121448181706406825.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Bureau of Labor Statistics shows food prices still going up as of May but at a slower rate than than April.
June's statistics will be posted middle of next month.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
i'm always sceptical of media statistics, but there's good reasons to believe inflation is higher than official measures, not least because of the 'basket of commodities' method which iirc takes a mean of 'typical' goods without regard to demand elasticity etc (if food prices are rising and ipod prices falling, proles spend more on food and less on ipods and their cost of living at the same material standard rises even if on average prices are stable). the RCLI purports to address this by weighting different goods for the 'average family' (which is probably methodologically dubious - unspecified 'averages' can prove almost anything), but seems as good an indication as any of where the real experience of cost of living's at. the telegraph seems to have run the story to push it's favoured 'big government taxes hard working families' line and is using the stats to argue for lower fuel tax, but then it was never going to argue for the abolition of commodity production really.
late wrote:
all the banks just messed up by indiscriminately giving people loads of credit
i think this is a symptom of a more underlying problem, i.e. for several decades at least the gap between rising costs of living and stagnant/declining real incomes has been plugged by credit, which has basically operated as a glorified pyramid scheme, deferring the contradiction but making the coming 'adjustment' more painful. make no mistake, as much as the bourgeoisie are fretting over the current crisis, it's not a crisis for capital per se, it will hurt some sections and benefit others and cull some of the inefficient ones, but the costs will be shifted onto us as much as we let them via real-terms wage cuts, rising living costs, rising interest rates and repossessions etc.
3 very quick points:-
- the current inflation is being driven by two main things: the gigantic amounts of money that have been pumped into the economy to reflate it since the credit crisis (which has been used to speculate on the commodity markets) plus the fact that the dollar has collapsed over the last year. This has had very disruptive effects on commodity (especially oil) pricing.
- the bourgeoisie are definitely worried about inflation. Inflation in the peripheral countries is galloping ahead and at the moment all eyes are on China. Part of the reason the Chinese stock market has fallen by over 50% since the start of the year is because of worries about deflation and the potential for major destabilisation of the Chinese "economic miracle". There's potential for a real crisis in in the peripheral countries which could be very nasty for the world economy because of the further impact on commodity markets.
- on domestic inflation, it's sometimes tempting to see what the fuss is about. After all, it's not quite the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s in the inflation stakes (including the Telegraph's estimate). Nonetheless, there is a real problem. Firstly, the years of declining wages have made workers far more sensitive to even small rates of inflation. This worries the bourgeoisie because it has a real potential to radicalise struggles and we can see they are already taking steps to contain this aspect. This feeds through into aspect 2: the bourgeoisie can tolerate a limited amount of inflation if they can use it to cut real wages - this can raise the rate of profit and restore profitability. If this fails because of struggles (which is, in part, what happened in the 70s) then inflation can quickly become a cancer that can devastate the whole economy. Just as workers are sensitive to any aspect of crisis, so too are the bourgeoisie. Their room for manouvre is much reduced even from the crisis-ridden 70s after decades of credit, massive state spending, growth of the parasitic economy etc.
The next decade is going to make previous decades look like a shining paradise compared to what is now coming. Even without outright recession, whole swathes of the economy are going to be annihilated (remember the deindustrialisation that took place during the 80s boom), the attacks on pensions and benefits are going to accelerate in an unprecedented manner and there will be a level of general instability that we haven't seen for a generation. On the periphery, whole countries may simply collapse (think more Asian and Argentinia style disasters) and we'll see similar signs of disintegration, albeit on a more contained level, in the weaker "Western" powers.
Telling us what most already suspect...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/13/cmcostofliving113.xml