1) Why Inflation Numbers Will Get Worse Before They Get Better
As regular HOTLINE readers know, our bet is that inflation will come down over the next six months to the still high 4 to 6% range. The fall in commodity prices and low market interest rates are signaling a fall in inflation.
BUT: Laffer Associates has a fascinating analysis of the month-by-month inflation rates. The table below shows that for the next three months the inflation numbers that drop out of the year-over-year price calculator were low. Those numbers from a year ago are 5.6% for July 2021, 4.1% for August, and 5% for September.
Monthly Consumer Price Index
As Laffer puts it:
“If the next three month’s numbers being added exceed 5.58% (next month), 4.08% (month after next), and 5.04% respectively, the CPI measured inflation will be larger than 9.1% for the months of July, August, and September. Does anyone believe that any one of, let alone all, the numbers for the next three months will be lower than these?”
We don’t.
So it won’t be until October before we see an improvement in the official inflation numbers. That’s REALLY bad news for the Democrats in November.
2) Hell Has Officially Frozen Over: Paul Krugman Admits He Was Wrong
This was the headline on Krugman’s latest column.
In his mea culpa, Krugman admits: “Some warned that the package would be dangerously inflationary; others were fairly relaxed. I was Team Relaxed. As it turned out, of course, that was a very bad call."
To say the least: 18 months ago Krugman predicted a “soaring Reagan-like ‘morning in America’ recovery.”
Not quite.
But in typical Krugman fashion, the Nobel winner still refuses to concede that the government spending “stimulus” model failed miserably. Instead, he blames factors like the pandemic and Putin.
Krugman explains his errors by saying his prediction was based on “historical experience.” But WHAT historical experience is he talking about? Government stimulus didn’t work for FDR in the 1930s, or Obama in 2009, or Japan over the last 30 years, or Europe, or anywhere at any time.
4) It Depends On What The Definition Of “Recession” Is
Have you noticed that in the last few years the left keeps changing the meaning of commonly used words? A few come to mind. What is the definition of “peaceful?“ What is the definition of a “woman?” What is the definition of “a secure border?” What is the definition of “transitory?”
Oh, and what is the definition of a “recession?” It’s always been two straight quarters of negative growth - which has happened in q1 and q2 of this year. But now Janet Yellen is telling us it is something else but what that is, she’s not sure of.
5) Shocking Story Of Potential Fraud In Alzheimer’s Research
The journal Science exposed what appears to be another massive scientific/academic/government fraud -- the key hypothesis behind most Alzheimer's research for the past 16 years was founded on doctored images.
The Science investigation reports that “a leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers have “discovered ‘shockingly blatant’ examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.”
The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”
If these allegations of fraud are borne out, it could mean that scientists have been chasing a massive multi-billion-dollar medical dead-end. It also means countless seniors suffered from mistargeted treatments and the lack of what could have been – better treatments if other hypotheses had been pursued.
There were warning signs. Two years ago Sharon Begley wrote this in STAT:
Zaven Khachaturian spent years at NIH overseeing its early Alzheimer’s funding. Amyloid partisans, he said, “came to permeate drug companies, journals, and NIH study sections,” the groups of mostly outside academics who decide what research NIH should fund. “Things shifted from a scientific inquiry into an almost religious belief system, where people stopped being skeptical or even questioning.”
The perversion of science to advance a political agenda – i.e. global warming and COVID – or to chase down hundreds of millions of dollars of research dollars is rampant. No wonder more and more Americans don’t trust “the science.”
