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QE2 and Its Effects: Treasury Bond Rates Rise

Treasury bond rates are rising.  The graph below clearly indicates this.  The bond investors do not believe Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s bullcrap.  That’s why rates are rising.  They are wising up.  Rising rate indicate that some bond investors are shuffling their feet quietly toward the exit.  There will be a panic at some point.  They all think they can get out of the burning building in time.  The burning building is the bond market.  Not all of them will.

On a related note, American Capital Agency Corp. (AGNC) reports 4Q2010 earnings this afternoon.  I’m curious to see how their net interest rate spread holds up.  Notice that short term rates have barely moved since the Federal Reserve started to implement QE2.  Check back later this afternoon for my blog on AGNC earnings.

QE2 and Its Effects: Treasury Bond Rates Rise

Gary North

Feb. 7, 2011

Here is what the Federal Open Market Committee announced on November 3, 2010.

To promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today to expand its holdings of securities. The Committee will maintain its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its securities holdings. In addition, the Committee intends to purchase a further $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month. The Committee will regularly review the pace of its securities purchases and the overall size of the asset-purchase program in light of incoming information and will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability.

The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate for an extended period.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20101103a.htm

Here is what has happened to bond rates since then.

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http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/Historic-Yield-Data-Visualization.aspx

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Marc Faber: Bernanke Is a Liar.

Marc Faber and several others (e.g. Jim Rogers, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul) who understand Austrian economics predicted the housing crisis and the financial crisis.  Knucklehead Keynesian economists like Ben Bernanke and all the talking heads on CNBC failed to see the coming crisis.  They are ignorant liars.  Enjoy the short video below.
Marc Faber: Bernanke Is a Liar

Bull Source

Investor Marc Faber talks with CNBC about the false economic recovery, Egypt, emerging economies, and inflation.

Faber believes the global economy may be okay for the next six months. “We have to realize that it’s an artificial recovery driven by ultra-expansionary monetary policies and also ultra-expansionary fiscal policies,” he comments. Faber predicts that deficits will lead to renewed problems down the road.

“The annual cost of living increases are more than 5% today and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is continuously lying about the inflation rate, including Mr. Bernanke. He’s a liar. Inflation is much higher than what they publish.”

Faber says the true cost of living increase for most US households is 5-8%, and just below that in Western Europe.

Reprinted with permission from Bull Source. You can subscribe to Bull Source posts for free here.

February 5, 2011

© 2011 Bull Source

Dr. Marc Faber [send him mail] lives in Chiangmai, Thailand and is the author of Tomorrow's Gold.
 
 
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Don't Trust the Inflation Numbers

Don’t trust the government reported price inflation numbers otherwise known as the consumer price index (CPI).  The government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics under-reports the true price increases that we all experience as we buy food, shelter, energy, healthcare, entertainment, and transportation.  I wrote about this in greater detail in August of 2010:

http://bit.ly/riggedCPI

You might be asking yourself why would the BLS change their methodology for computing the CPI?  The reason is simple.  The two largest federal welfare programs: Social Insecurity and Medicare would go broke dozen of years earlier without the rigging of the CPI.  It is in every president’s and congress’ best personal best interest to delay the day of reckoning.  Rigging the CPI helps to kick the can.

The Federal Reserve and the monetary base

There will be massive price inflation caused by all the money that the Federal Reserve has created out-of-thin-air since late 2008.  The Wall Street Journal author does not understand the mechanics of money creation.  The Federal Reserve creates the money and buys assets (usually US government debt like they are doing now with QE2).  This expands the FED’s balance sheet and adds money to the monetary base.  Prices don’t go up until the monetary base gets transformed into money that actually goes into people’s bank accounts. 

The fractional-reserve banking process in a nutshell

The banks receive the freshly printed dollars or digital dollars in their accounts for the US government debts that they sold to the Federal Reserve.  The banks can then lend almost all of the money they received from the FED – OR – they can choose to not lend it.  They have chosen to lend very little of it.  They call the money above the legal reserve requirement the  “excess reserves”.  The banks are holding over a trillion dollars as excess reserves.  When banks lend they create new money.  For example, if the legal reserve requirement was set at 10% (it is much lower than this), then Bank A that received a $1,000 deposit from a customer would be allowed to lend $900 and would have to keep $100 as reserve.  The person who received the $900 loan from Bank A would deposit $900 into his checking account at Bank B until he was ready to spend the loan money.  Bank B could loan $810 to someone else while keeping $90 (10%) as legal reserves.  This is how money is created.  A $1,000 increase in the monetary base multiplies many times through this process.  The M1 money supply increases.  Prices increase.

If the banks lent that money in a manner like they did in 2006, then prices would roughly double in a relatively short time.  Keep this in mind as you read the WSJ article below.

Economy by Brett Arends (Author Archive)

Don't Trust the Inflation Numbers

A surprising number of people on Wall Street will tell you not to worry too much about inflation.

After all, they'll say, just look at the numbers. The inflation picture is incredibly benign. In the past 12 months the Consumer Price Index has risen just 1.5%—a remarkably low rate. And when you strip out volatile food and energy costs, they'll say, it's even lower—a meager 0.8%.

It doesn't stop there. Many economists will point out that wages are also rising by less than 2% a year. With so many people still out of work, goes the line, labor costs are going to stay low for a long time too. So what's the worry?

Clearly, a lot of investors agree. Inflation-protected government bonds, which people would buy to protect themselves if they were worried, have fallen in price in the past couple of months. Gold, another inflation hedge, is down. Ten-year Treasury bonds yield less—3.3%—than they did when President Eisenhower left office.

It's crazy. There is plenty to worry about. As you battle to manage your family's finances, be aware that there are three reasons why inflation needs to be on your radar screen.

• First, the official inflation numbers should be taken with a fistful of salt.

Over the past 30 years, the federal government has made a lot of changes to the way it calculates inflation. It's taken place under presidents of both parties. Each change in methodology has come with plausible-sounding justifications. But, as if by magic, each change has had the effect of flattering the numbers. Funny, that.

According to one rogue economist, John Williams at Shadow Government Statistics , if we still calculated inflation the way we did when Jimmy Carter was president, the official inflation figures would look about as bad as they did when ... Jimmy Carter was president. According to Mr. Williams's calculations, if we counted inflation under the old system the official rate wouldn't be 1.5%. It would be closer to 10%.

Mr. Williams is just one voice. But it makes sense to treat the government numbers with skepticism.

Under the official calculations, if steak prices boom, the government just assumes you buy cheaper hamburger instead. Presto—no inflation!

Or consider the case of Apple ( AAPL: 344.46*, +3.06, +0.89% ) computers. We all know Macs are expensive. And we know Apple doesn't discount. The cheapest Mac laptop today costs $999. A few years ago, it also cost $999. So the price is the same, right?

Ha. Not according Uncle Sam. Using a piece of chicanery called "hedonics," Uncle Sam calls this a price cut. His reasoning? You're getting more for the money. Today's $999 Mac is lighter, fancier and faster than last year's $999 Mac. So the government calculates that the "real" price has actually fallen.

How's that work in the real world? Try it. Go into your local Apple store and ask for 50% off thanks to hedonics. (If you do, please, please video the exchange and put in YouTube. We could all use a good laugh.)

Instead, the government is worrying about deflation, partly because of all the "cheap" MacBooks out there.

• The second reason to treat the official inflation figures with some mistrust is that they look backward. They register what just happened, not what's about to happen next.

OK, so the prices of many things haven't risen. Yet. But if the laws of economics mean anything, they will have to. Why? Because costs are rising.

Economists need to stop focusing just on labor costs. The world has plenty of surplus labor. But look at raw materials. Around the world prices are skyrocketing, from copper to cocoa. The United Nations Food Price Index has just hit a new record high. Oil's back near $90 a gallon. Wheat prices have nearly doubled since last summer.

Soaring food prices helped spark the revolution in Tunisia. According to Alex Bos, commodities analyst at Macquarie Securities in London, other governments—especially in North Africa—have responded with panic buying of foodstuffs.

Algeria alone, he says, has bought about 1.5 million tons of wheat this month—maybe triple its usual amount. Saudi Arabia is rushing to build up grain supplies. Corn supplies are as tight as they were back in the inflationary 1970s.

Sooner or later this is going to show up in your supermarket, or at the mall, in higher prices.

Just ask McDonald's ( MCD: 75.40*, -0.08, -0.10% ) . Or paints and plastics giant DuPont ( DD: 50.36*, +1.32, +2.69% ) . Or Kleenex and Huggies maker Kimberly-Clark ( KMB: 65.21*, -0.40, -0.60% ) . Or 3M ( MMM: 89.18*, +0.68, +0.76% ) . Or Coach ( COH: 54.61*, +1.52, +2.86% ) . These companies, and many others, have warned in recent days that they're getting squeezed by rising costs. They'll either eat the costs, which will hit the stock, or pass them on. How is this not inflation?

• The third reason to be mistrustful of the inflation picture? Simple. Economics.

We are flooding the world with extra dollars. The Fed simply invents as many as it likes. In the past couple of years, to try to keep the economy out of a tailspin, it has more than doubled the size of the so-called monetary base.

A dollar bill has no intrinsic value. Dollars are only "worth" something because you can exchange them for a haircut, or a pair of shoes, or a book from Amazon.com ( AMZN: 175.63*, -1.07, -0.60% ) . So if you drastically increase the number of dollars without a commensurate increase in the number of goods and services, each dollar must, by definition, be worth less. That's another way of describing inflation.

So far, this inflation seems to have shown up in the unlikeliest of places. It's like Whac-A-Mole. The price of vintage wines has skyrocketed 57% in the past year, according to the Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 Index . Real estate prices across China are in a bubble. So long as the Chinese tie themselves to the U.S. dollar, they are importing our inflation. But, once again, one wonders how this can be called benign.

Is inflation certain? I'm wary of any predictions. Casey Stengel once said, "Never make predictions, especially about the future." Mr. Stengel would have lasted three days as a Wall Street analyst. But he won five World Series in a row, and he knew a thing or two.

Maybe inflation really will stay tame. But I'm not counting on it. I'm not buying the conventional wisdom, and neither should you.

Published January 26, 2011

Read more: ROI: Don't Trust the Inflation Numbers - SmartMoney.com http://www.smartmoney.com/investing/economy/roi-dont-trust-the-inflation-numbers-1296052731208/#ixzz1CAwwqdMx

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The Surprising Price of Wheat

The Surprising Price of Wheat

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01/20/11 Tampa, Florida – I was intrigued by the title of the essay “The Cheapest Thing on Earth” by Nathan Lewis here at The Daily Reckoning.

I was interested because I thought that such a tasty trivia tidbit could come in handy, like this morning when I could have used it as a distraction when my kids were calling me “cheap” because I wouldn’t open up my wallet and give them another king’s ransom for some new dumb reason; I forget what, but there was a lot of crying and wailing about it, whatever it was.

This is where I could have said, to throw them off, “Cheap? What do you know about cheap? Do you know what is the cheapest thing on earth? Huh? Do ya? Huh? Do ya? Yes or no?!”

Instead of providing me with the answer, he starts off with a pop quiz! Damn!

And when I say “pop” quiz, I mean exactly that, as he says, “Quick: name an asset, publicly traded, that is the cheapest in a hundred years.” Pop!

I, of course, had no idea, and instead of admitting it, I quickly read ahead, hoping to immediately find the answer, only to be surprised when he taunted me. “Houses?” he asks. “Nope. Stocks? I don’t think so. Commercial real estate? Bonds?”

By this time I was pretty peeved, and getting bored, too, as I was sure that if it was, indeed, none-of-the-above, then this was going to devolve into something about investing in something obscure, the significance of which would elude me even if you explained it to me over and over again, in a company I never heard of, and, probably, in a country I never heard of, either.

Just before I gave up reading in disgust, he dared to taunt me one more time, the bastard! “Not too many, are there?” he asks.

At this final insult, my mind screamed, “Damn you! Damn you to hell! Tell me now, or I will fire off a flaming email that will be both highly insulting and vaguely threatening!”

I could almost hear his cruel, mocking laughter as he rudely called my bluff, and further insulted me and my false bravado with, “Now here’s a tougher one. Name an asset that is near the lowest price in all of human history.”

Arrgghhh! In all of human history? By this time I am angry and distraught, mostly angry, that somebody was exposing my stupidity and ignorance!

Suddenly, I am gasping for air and screaming that if he doesn’t tell me the answer pretty soon, I am going to start hearing those voices in my head again, and (now that you mention it) if I listen really closely, I can almost hear them already, way off in the distance, screaming to be heard and obeyed.

And we all remember how it turned out the LAST time that happened.

Obviously intimidated by the sudden revelation of the strange, powerful forces he is unleashing, he quickly announces, “The answer is: wheat”!!

I admit that I personally put those two final exclamation points at the end of his sentence as an emphasis, both to indicate surprise and to remind you that there are surely significant ramifications of this “price of wheat” thing, the horrors of which I never allow myself to even think, except during sleep, and then hopefully only when I am dreaming of being with some beautiful young thing, and maybe with some of her friends, too, who are all naked and sweaty and grunting and heaving and writhing around in some surreal bacchanalia of some kind, where the only interruption is the masses of people outside wailing and crying that “The price of food is up so much that we are burning things and looting grocery stores in mindless anger and desperation, and we are looking for the Fabulous Mogambo Seer (FMS) to pledge our undying allegiance and love because he predicted that this inflationary hell is Exactly What Would Happen (EWWH) when the stupid Federal Reserve kept creating more and more fiat money, creating astonishing amounts of money, creating outrageous amounts of money, creating So Much Freaking Money (SMFM) for so, so long that We’re Freaking Doomed (WFD)!”

I can reliably report, thanks to these dreams, that the sound of people starving to death is a real “mood killer,” perhaps on a par with the horror that wheat is now at the highest price ever, even going back to Biblical times, which is probably why those old Bible-era people were always “breaking bread,” and eating unleavened wheat crackers, and consuming miscellaneous cheap wheat products instead of having, you know, a few tasty tacos or maybe a pizza once in awhile, which I figure must have been because they were very expensive or something, which is why you never hear of anybody eating them.

Anyway, I immediately used this new information-as-icebreaker at the supermarket, and told the cashier, as she rang up my groceries, “I’ll bet you don’t know that wheat is at its lowest price in recorded history, but climbing fast because the horrid Federal Reserve is still creating So Freaking Much Money (SFMM) that the terrifying, heartbreaking misery and suffering of inflation in the prices of subsistence prices of items, like wheat, is guaranteed! Guaranteed, I tells ya!”

She just dragged my frozen burrito across her laser scanner, the irritating “beep!” noise only underscoring her complete lack of interest.

I went on, helpfully adding that they also said, “Actually, the entire agriculture complex, including corn, beef, pork and beans could fit this description.”

Again the lonely “beep!” as she listlessly ran my bag of Oreo Double Stuf cookies through the beam, her face never changing, not even to make the time pass with idle conversation about, for example, how much she adores cute old guys who buy such delicious cookies, or how my eyes twinkle so charmingly, or even to say how she noticed I kept looking at her boobs. You know; anything.

Giving up, I took my groceries in hand and parted without giving anyone my usual advice, which is to “Buy gold and silver right now, using whatever money you can glean from your stupid little job, because inflation is going to eat us alive, and a weird, distorted economy will make it even more hellish, all thanks to the horrid Federal Reserve continuing to create so much excess money. And buying gold and silver is so easy that a bunch of bored, underpaid worker-bees in a low-margin business like you can do it! In fact, it’s so easy that even morons say, ‘Whee! This investing stuff is easy!’”

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning

Author Image for The Mogambo Guru

The Mogambo Guru

Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning , and other fine publications.

Read more: The Surprising Price of Wheat http://dailyreckoning.com/the-surprising-price-of-wheat/#ixzz1BnH5UDUA

 
Wheatprice chart, 2000-2009
 
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Volcker Leaves the Obama Team

Bill Bonner reports that former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker has left the Obama economic advisory team (www.dailyreckoning.com). This means that there is no dissenting opinion to Ben Bernanke's money printing and historic low interest rate madness. Don't get me wrong. Massive double digit price increases are on there way in the next couple of years regardless of Volker's presence. Volker could have dampened the eagerness to print more fiat dollars once price inflation reaches double digits. Imagine the public outcry when gasoline reaches $6.00 per gallon. Perhaps we haven't seen the last of Mr. Volker.

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Prepare for massive price inflation that makes the late 1970's look like a great time. Ignore warnings of deflation until the Federal Reserve abandons quantitative easing and they refuse to buy Treasuries. High dividend stocks can help you stay ahead of the price increases. Subscribe to www.myhighdividendstocks.com/feed to discover high dividend stocks with earning power and strong balance sheets.

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Why Gold has been Money and will be Money Again

I'm a fan of physical gold coins.  They should comprise at least 5-30% of you non-house net worth.  Too bad there are no high dividend gold stocks.  Please enjoy this short article on why gold has historically been money.  
 
 
Every central bank in the word is inflating its money supply.  Some are inflating faster than others.  The US central bank, the Federal Reserve, is leading the way with QE2 and its massive inflation of late 2008.  The Bank of Japan is barely inflating.  That is why the Yen is stregthening versus the Dollar.
 
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Why You Shouldn't Trust the Core CPI Numbers

This article from The Daily Reckoning’s Addison Wiggin is spot on.  The CPI numbers are rigged to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent a few extra years.  This is why your high dividend stock portfolio must generate at least a 6% - 10% return to beat the real price inflation caused by the FED’s counterfeiting.

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Why You Shouldn’t Trust the Core CPI Numbers

12/15/10 Baltimore, Maryland – Consumer prices rose 0.1% in November…and less than a percent over the past year. If you strip out food and energy – which government number crunchers do, because those prices are allegedly “volatile” – you still get a 0.1% increase.

That’s the “core” CPI, and that’s what the monetary mandarins at the Federal Reserve care about when drafting plans to buy Treasuries, control interest rates, goose employment numbers, order pizza, drink wine, play Xbox 360 or any of the myriad other things they do during their FOMC meetings.

As a group, they can’t be pleased with the number. Over the last year, despite trillions of dollars in government stimulus and quantitative easing, core CPI has risen a scant 0.8% – far below the Fed’s “sweet spot” of 1.6-2.0%.

But whom are we kidding? Even the “headline” figure, the one including food and energy, is suspect.

Our friends at Casey Research put out this chart a couple months ago. The column in the far right – CPI-U – is actually lower now than it was then, all those other columns notwithstanding:

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How does the government pull this off? We ask constant readers to indulge our newer ones as we revisit three of the most common tools the statisticians use…

  • Substitution. If steak becomes more expensive, and you buy hamburger instead, then the Bureau of Labor Statistics reasons your cost of beef has stayed the same – no inflation!
  • Hedonics. If the 2011 model of a car costs more than the 2010 model, but it also comes with more standard equipment, the BLS reasons you’re still getting the same value for your money – no inflation!
  • Geometric weighting. Nothing fancy here: If the price of something goes up, the BLS simply makes it count for less in the CPI relative to everything else. If the price comes down, it counts for more. Voila!

These changes started with the last round of Social Security “reform” under the auspices of Alan Greenspan in the early ’80s. The idea was that if CPI were lower, Uncle Sam could pay out less in Social Security benefits.

You can see the end result over time maintained by our friend John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics. Mr. Williams calculates economic numbers the way they did back in the Carter era. The “official” CPI number is in red. The shadow stat is in blue:

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In the meantime, the Federal Reserve statement issued after yesterday’s meeting amounted to, “steady as she goes” on the ill-fated QE2. The Fed, looking at current “official” CPI numbers, sees “deflation”…

And so the plan to goose the system with $875 billion in Treasury purchases that started last month will continue to at least double the official rate from whence it sat while they were kibitzing over bagels before the meeting began yesterday morning.

Sooner or later, reality is going to catch up to the gamed statistics. Indeed, “an inflationary outbreak is very likely,” says Chris Mayer, editor of Mayer’s Special Situations.

History is on our side.

“The dollar has done nothing more reliably than lose its value over time,” Chris points out. “I think the future will be no different. People who worry about deflation – that, somehow, the dollars in our pocket will actually buy more in the years ahead, not less – will not only be wrong. They will be broke.

“Writer Jason Zweig points out that ‘Since 1960, 69% of the world’s market-oriented economies have suffered at least one year in which inflation ran at an annualized rate of 25% or more. On average, those inflationary periods destroyed 53% of an investor’s purchasing power.’

“That is why I believe that being prepared for inflation is the most important investment decision we have to face in the coming decade. If you aren’t prepared, then the consequence is a mean hit to your wealth.”

Addison Wiggin
for The Daily Reckoning

Read more: Why You Shouldn't Trust the Core CPI Numbers http://dailyreckoning.com/why-you-shouldnt-trust-the-core-cpi-numbers/#ixzz19LBybZFb

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The Duel Over the FED's Dual Mandate

The Duel Over the Fed's Dual Mandate

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By: Peter Schiff

Given the opposing views of the potentially parsimonious new Congress and the continuously accommodative Federal Reserve, there is a movement afoot among Republicans to eliminate the Fed's "dual mandate." Prior to 1977, the Fed only had one job: maintaining price stability. However, the stagflation of the 1970s inspired politicians to assign another task: promoting maximum employment. This "mission creep" has transformed the Fed from a monetary watchdog into an instrument of social policy. We would do well to give them back their original job.

The imposition of the "dual mandate" was informed by the Keynesian belief that inflation and unemployment don't mix. An economic concept known as the "Phillips curve" postulates that low levels of one cause high levels of the other. But, like many things in modern economics, the curve is a fiction. There is no real reason why low inflation would produce unemployment or full employment would create inflation.

On paper, at least, the Fed has appeared to strike the balance that Congress demands. But this is a fool's errand. The Fed's dual mandate is the equivalent of asking a corporate CEO to maximize shareholder value by giving away as many free products as possible to consumers.

The best way for the Fed to ensure maximum employment is to focus on its one true job - creating price stability. The irony of the dual mandate is that by trying to satisfy both, the Fed ensures that we will get neither.

While it is true that increases in inflation may occur concurrently with drops in unemployment, there is no logical causality that can be implied. Any correlation simply results from inflation lowering the real cost of employment. Put simply: because inflation reduces wages in real terms, employers can afford to hire more people. So it's lower wages, not inflation, that puts people to work.

Inflation does nothing to alter the structural issues that cause unemployment. Like everything else, the labor market is governed by the laws of supply and demand. High unemployment results from a wage structure that is too high relative to demand. Demand for labor is a function of productivity, or more accurately, profitability per worker. Absent higher productivity, which takes time to develop, the only way to clear the imbalance is for wages to fall. However, government and unions typically prevent this from happening. Economists describe this as wages being "sticky" on the downside.

Over-taxation and over-regulation further restrict demand and add to unemployment. On that front, one of the worst offenders is the minimum wage law. It doesn't actually raise wages for anyone, but simply renders unemployable many low-skill workers. By creating inflation, the Fed effectively lowers the minimum wage. Another cause is extended unemployment benefits. Since these payments narrow the disparity between employment and unemployment, and in some cases may even be preferable to accepting a low-paying job, workers are incentivized to reject employment opportunities that they might otherwise accept.

To get around these roadblocks, the Fed lowers the cost of labor through inflation. However, this inefficient solution to a simple problem creates negative consequences for the economy. While wages may go up with inflation, goods prices usually rise faster. The net result offers no benefit for workers. By tricking workers into accepting lower wages, the Fed allows politicians to claim meaningless victories.

In addition, wages are only one cost of employment. Even as inflation lowers real wages, other factors can work to increase employment costs. In the current environment, higher payroll taxes, new health care mandates, economic uncertainty, and the potential for even higher future taxes to fund large budget deficits are all offsetting the "benefits" of lower wages. On top of that, large current budget deficits are crowding out small business credit. The result is that employment costs are rising despite lower real wages. Taken together, these policy mistakes are creating a toxic, job-killing mix.

The other fallacy of the dual mandate is that a fully employed workforce demands higher wages, forcing business to raise prices. More employment increases the supply of goods and services. Yes, employment raises demand, but that demand is satisfied by the additional supply created by a productive economy.

Since wages are the price of labor, wages are themselves prices. To say that rising prices are caused by rising prices makes no sense. Workers cannot demand higher wages unless the increases are justified by higher productivity. If they are, such wage gains will not result in higher goods prices.

The real reason that prices rise, for both goods and wages, is that the Fed creates inflation. This policy undermines the economy by destroying both current savings and the incentives to accumulate future savings. Since savings finance capital investment, lower savings equal weaker economic growth.

So, the best way for the Fed to create maximum employment is to focus on the single mandate of price stability. While a few elected officials seem to be figuring this out, most are just as clueless as the Fed. Unfortunately, even if Congress succeeds in changing the Fed's mandate, there is not much chance that monetary policy will change significantly. Keynesian thinking is so ingrained in Bernanke and his colleagues that they will exploit any wiggle room in their directives to jump back in the driver's seat and send us ever faster toward the edge of an economic cliff.

About the author: Peter Schiff
Peter Schiff picturePeter Schiff, President & Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital (http://www.europac.net), is one of the few non-biased investment advisors (not committed solely to the short side of the market) to have correctly called the current bear market in U.S. dollar denominated assets...


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Be Very Afraid: The 'Experts' Are Running the Economy

Be Very Afraid: The 'Experts' Are Running the Economy
by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Recently by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: Some Americans Distrust Authority

When Young Americans for Liberty at Indiana University first invited me to speak last year, the group ran into resistance from the university administration. Having consulted the economics department, the relevant university office declared that I was "uncredentialed," and that perhaps a professor from IU’s economics faculty could give a nice lecture instead. I was uncredentialed, presumably, because my education at Harvard and Columbia was in history, not economics.

The student group refused to take this lying down, and made such a stink in the local media, pointing to my bio and the reception of my book Meltdown – including the friendly coverage it received from mainstream outlets like Barron’s, CBS.com, and UPI – that the university not only reversed its stance but even partially funded my appearance, which took place on September 21 of this year.

 
The Indiana Daily Student (circulation 15,500) offered me a 600-word guest column in the wake of my appearance. Here’s what I wrote, which they published verbatim (complete with a comments section). ~ Tom Woods

 
The free market did not cause the financial crisis, and the Elmer’s glue and Scotch tape our wise leaders have applied to the economy are only prolonging the agony. That’s the thesis of my 2009 New York Times bestseller, Meltdown.

That’s not a popular thing to say in Bloomington, I learned several months ago.

When Young Americans for Liberty at IU hit a bureaucratic stone wall in trying to invite me to campus – a problem I can’t say I’ve run into at any other university – the local media took notice. But it was the comment sections that were a particular hoot. It was as though I had insulted Stalin in the old Soviet Union. Who does this idiot think he is? How dare he speak of our wise overlords that way! Why, they’re just looking out for the good of the people! And so on, as if I’d stumbled into some kind of cliché competition.

Then, when the university reversed itself and even helped fund my appearance, the comments switched to, "If I had time, I’d go over there and set this guy straight!" Uh-huh. The large crowd that came to hear me a couple weeks ago couldn’t have been friendlier.

What I explained at IU was that asset bubbles, like the housing bubble we’ve just lived through, do not occur spontaneously. If people bought lots of houses on the free market, interest rates would rise as the banks’ loanable funds were depleted. That would put an end to speculation in real estate.

 
But thanks to the Federal Reserve System (or simply the "Fed"), which is no part of the free market, large infusions of money created out of thin air kept interest rates low, and thus perpetuated the bubble. During an asset bubble, demand for the asset in question rises, as does its price. Where would people get the money to keep buying an increasingly costly asset if the government’s officially approved money machine weren’t there to flood the economy with cash?

 
It was this interference with interest rates, pushing them well below where the free market would have set them, that set in motion the classic boom-bust cycle we’ve just witnessed. F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks like the Federal Reserve, by interfering with interest rates and not allowing them to tell entrepreneurs the truth about economic conditions, divert the economy into unsustainable configurations that inevitably come undone in a crash. (Hayek belongs to a tradition of free-market thought called the Austrian School of economics.)

None of this has anything to do with the free market.

Adding fuel to the fire was the so-called Greenspan put, the unofficial policy of the Greenspan Fed that promised assistance to private firms in the event of risky investments gone bad. What kind of incentives do you suppose that created?

The point of being in college is to learn how to think beyond clichés. Forget the quacks who told us, cluelessly, that everything was fine with the economy in 2007. Look instead to modern spokesmen of the Austrian School like Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, and Jim Grant. You know, the people who, unlike your professors (who, by the way, tried to keep a dissident voice from speaking on campus), predicted the recent crash to a T.

Want to know what really happened to the economy, and why your job prospects are so bleak? Watch Peter Schiff’s YouTube "Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One." That’s the first step toward becoming the independent thinker that four years at IU are supposed to make of you.
 

September 30, 2010

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and his master's, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the author of ten books, including the just-released Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, and the New York Times bestsellers Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Visit his website and blog, follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to his YouTube Channel.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

High Dividend Stocks - Safeguarding against the loss of purchasing power

Why are you contemplating investing in high dividend stocks?  I consider high dividend stocks those yielding over 6%.  One reason could be that you want your dividends to outpace so-called "inflation".

What metric best measures the loss of your money's purchasing power at the hands of the Federal Reserve?

If you ask people at work and on the street how much prices go per year on average, then you are likely to get the answer 3-4% per year from 80% of them.

As horrendous as annual consumer price increases of 3-4% are...the story doesn't end there.  You've had this nagging feeling your whole adult life that the prices you pay for shelter, food, energy, healthcare, utilities, and entertainment add up to a whole lot more that 3-4%.  Well, you were right and a gentleman named John Williams over at www.shadowstats.com can confirm you hunches with actual numbers (http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts).

You see, the consumer price index (CPI) is a collossal lie to put off the day of reckoning for Social Security, Medicare, and a myriad of pensions.  These ponzi schemes and underfunded pensions go broke faster when consumer prices rise.  Past presidential administrations convinced the Bureau of Labor Statistics to modify the methods of computing the CPI in order to kick the bankrupcy can beyond their presidency.  You can read about how they changed the computations at ShadowStats.com.

The bottom line is that actual real life consumer price increases are several percentage points above what the government reports.  Right now, according to ShadowStats.com the rate of consumer price increases of a representative sample of goods is about 8%.

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Now do you understand why I think you need to investing in high dividend stocks yielding more than 6% with earning power and strong balance sheets.  The earning power and strong balance sheets ensure the dividend and provides an opportunity for capital appreciation in the market price in your stock.

There will be many choice stocks yielding over 6% when this bear market rally finally fizziles.  Be patient, save your capital, and get ready to buy when everyone else is fearful (think of the fear below the March 2009 lows).