Food Price Inflation to Spur Zombie Takeover
A recent email blared, “The National Inflation Association says there is reason for grave concern”, to which I thought to myself, “Well, welcome to my world, chumps, because all I do is bewail the horrors of the coming inflation in prices that will follow such huge inflations in the money supply!”
With such a dismissive attitude, you can tell that I was going to trash the email without reading it when, suddenly, I noticed that they used the word “grave”, as in a hole in the ground where cemetery workers dump what is left of dead, emaciated bodies after the terrifying rise in prices, caused by massive creation of money by the Federal Reserve and jammed into the economy by the massive deficit-spending of the deplorable Obama administration, forcing people to live in abandoned buildings and eat various rodents and local flora, perhaps snacking on the occasional corpse, whereupon these people turn into raging zombies who hide by day and come out at night to kill people, splitting open the heads of their victims and eating their brains, walking mechanically and stiffly down the street, arms held akimbo, hollowly intoning, “Brains! Must have brains to eat!” and it’s a real scary mess until somebody, at the last minute, gets the good idea to get some flame throwers, a successful tactic that seems to elude the typical zombie mind, even as they are being incinerated.
Well, as bad as this doomsday scenario is, it could get scarier, like if the zombies started using flame throwers, too, or even scarier, like the actual news, which is that “US food prices jumped by 2.4 percent in March 2010 in the largest monthly leap in more than 26 years, and the sixth consecutive monthly increase.” Yikes!
A 2.4% monthly leap! That’s a 28% annualized increase in the price of food! In One Freaking Year (OFY)! Yikes!
By this time, alarms are going off in my head, and, like the terrific husband and father that I am, I shout protectively to the family, “This is it! The inflationary collapse that comes from the Federal Reserve creating too much money and the idiotic Congress deficit spending too much money has started, just like I said! To the bunkers, morons! Hup! Hup! Let’s go!” expecting, you know, that they would immediately jump up, their eyes shining with pride as they obediently follow me into the Mogambo Bunker Of Paranoid Seclusion (MBOPS) where they could make themselves useful by, perhaps, zapping up some microwave pizza, or at least just shut up and stand attentively by to help with reloading something, just in case.
Alas, it was not to be, and among the hooting and jeering from my family, my wife even insulted me by asking, “Will you be back in time for dinner?” like this economic calamity is just a stroll down to the beach and back!
So I say to her, as I am sweeping by her on my way to the MBOPS and trying to keep a tone of incredulousness out of my voice, “Do you realize that the National Inflation Association says that fresh and dry vegetables are up 56.1% in price in the last year? How about that fresh fruits and melons are up 28.8% in price in that selfsame last year? How about eggs ‘for fresh use’ being up 33.6%, or beef and veal up 10.7%, or dairy products being up 9.7%? Does any of this inflationary horror mean anything to you?”
As I did not stop to listen, I missed most of her reply, and I was soon out the door and out of earshot, but I remember that it started out with the usual muttering under her breath, which means I assume she went on to wail about how she has wasted her life marrying me and blah, blah, blah.
And so I missed whatever it was she had to say, although I am sure I have heard it before.
And speaking of missing something, I missed it myself, but Dan Amoss here at The Daily Reckoning reported, “Already we’re seeing very high producer prices. The Wall Street Journal described this phenomenon in a recent article entitled ‘The High Cost of Raw Materials.’”
The Journal reported that “Data on producer prices released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday shows how rapidly the pressure on corporate America is mounting. The producer-price index showed that crude goods such as iron ore, construction sand and pulp shot up 44.5% year-over-year, the fastest rate since 1974. Including energy and food costs, crude goods prices rose 33.4%.”
He goes on to report that “The ISM’s Prices Paid Index is telling a similar story”, which is that “the ISM announced that its Prices Paid Index registered the largest year-over-year increase since the 1970s.”
And what does this mean to the average guy, like you and me, who is just looking for a way to make a lot of money without working? It’s easy: buy gold, silver and oil! It’s so easy that I sometimes say, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”
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