The Fed has chosen to use all of its might to fight deflation now. Of course, the side effect will be battling against high inflation in the future. However, this is the right thing to do.

Inflation can be controlled by making it harder to spend money. Interest rates can be raised and the supply of money can be cut off. The measures are painful, but the battle can be won.

Deflation is far nastier. Consumers who think a product will be cheaper tomorrow will hold off buying it today. Once people get in the habit of not spending, it is hard to get them to start again. Furthermore, the inability to raise prices hurts corporate earnings and limits wage increases. Deflation then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that lingers for an extended period of time.

We are seeing the effects of deflation in holiday shopping patterns. Consumers waited through all

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Deflationary forces are pushing the price of gold lower. However, beyond the short-term price for paper gold, some of the news is surprisingly bullish. I'm putting out an update to my recent gold report today, with some very interesting news on supply and demand. The director of the World Gold Council was on CNBC yesterday talking about it. You can see that video here: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=933064521 Some of the bullish news for gold ... * Global demand rose 18% to 1,133.4 metric tonnes from 963.3 tonnes a year earlier.* In dollar terms, the jump in demand was even bigger. Dollar demand for gold reached an all time quarterly record of $32 billion in the third quarter, a whopping 45% higher than the previous record … set in the second quarter.* Identifiable investment, which includes purchases through exchange-traded funds and of bars ...

The US government is bankrupting our economy by burning through hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in the form of bailouts to Paulson and Cheney cronies. American Express is getting bailout money? Seriously? American Express could vanish off the face of the Earth and we'd hardly notice. I think it telling though, that American Express' customers can't pay their bills.The government needs to focus on saving businesses that could still be saved and are worth saving. And Robert Reich has some choice words about the bailout ...When a big company that gets into trouble is more valuable living than dead, there used to be a well-established legal process for reorganizing it - called chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. Under it, creditors took some losses, shareholders even bigger ones, some managers' heads rolled. Companies cleaned up their books and got a fresh start. And taxpayers didn't pay a penny.So why, exactly, is the ...

If the new president looked a little, well, burdened on election night, chances are he’s aging a couple of years in the six-hour span between the release of unemployment figures this morning and his first news conference as president-elect this afternoon.

 

6.5% unemployment in October — worst since early Clintontime.  Worse still were the revisions of the August and September numbers.  And as Karl Denninger noticed, the number of unemployed plus the number of people working part-time who’d like to work full-time now tops 11%.  (And who knows what the real figure would turn out to be once John Williams applies Carter-era standards to the numbers.)

As I write, the president-elect is meeting with his “Transition Economic Advisory Board,” his temporary brain trust as it were.  The names on the panel are, well, interesting.  Some of the faces from I.O.U.S.A. are there.  But one has to wonder if

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About one-third of the S&P 500 reports earnings this week. Yesterday we saw euphoria and I thought it interesting that the major indices went up with oil prices. Today, oil prices are down, and stocks across the board slid at the open. Clearly, fears about the economy remain. Here are some things I'm reading today ... Robert Reich observes that the bailout plans, for all their trillions of dollars spent, are like "pouring water into an dry sponge." he says: Nothing will come out of it because Wall Street is so deep in debt that the banks are using the extra money to improve their balance sheets. They're hoarding it because their true balance sheets -- considering the off-balance sheet vehicles they created over the past several years -- are in such rotten shape.Mr. Reich also says: The underlying problem isn't a liquidity problem. As ...