Article that may be of interest to some: (Click on the link for the charts, i'm not pasting them all in)
Not the most convincing article data-wise... cherry-pick 10 charts out of what must be 1000 possibilities and truncate their axes for maximum effect. Apart from the obvious (they happen to go up in the last month) why would an impartial study choose these 10 over the other possibilities? Inflation/deflation is an average, of course the odd thing will buck the trend, the charts say nothing without further justification.
Whilst I agree with your cynical approach, I think you'll find that those are fairly standard commodities. What commodities would you include instead? I think the charts being truncated is not an issue as they show the % increase over the month. Unless you're challenging the validity of the chart data?
If the guy was attempting to be impartial he could for example have picked the 10 most important food commodities, as well as the top 5 industrial metals or something; some of which of course would have decreased in price. Of course even the 'top ten' according to some reasonable measure probably isn't a good indicator of the whole if they happen to buck the trend. Ideally, official inflation measures should weight almost all commodities appropriately to come up with a realistic indicator of the whole. I would have respected the article if instead of text-book cherry-picking, it had produced an argument as to why the official weighting or procedure was inaccurate or misleading in some way. For example, I recall that real estate is commonly excluded from inflation calculations. Truncating charts 'exaggerates' % increases for effect - perhaps this is what you meant by 'show'. If commodity A rises steadily in price from $0.50 to $1 it is a 50% increase and you can show a graph with the axis from $0 to $1 to illustrate it. If commodity B on the other hand rises steadily in price from $1.01 to $1.02 (about a 1% increase) you can produce a chart that looks the same as the chart from A just by truncating the vertical axis so that it goes from $1 to $1.02. Thus truncating the axis has visually exaggerated the % increase in B here.
Visually I didn't care so much about the charts - my point was that the % figure was included so out didn't really matter. Although I do agree that changing chart axis' is a common and misleading approach. From your analysis of commodities over the month, you're saying that commodity prices actually fell on average, if you include other metals/commodities? Care to give your own analysis/commentary on this data? I'm interested in your conclusion.
I should have said above, I haven't done any analysis on this and don't have a conclusion, so I'm not saying that the conclusion of the article is wrong. My observation was that the analysis presented to support the conclusion was rubbish. It seems likely that the official calculation showed a fall in commodity prices (though I can't even be bothered checking). Perhaps the official calculation is irrelevant, perhaps a short term fall in commodity prices is irrelevant? So sorry, no conclusions here. I need to do a LOT more reading concerning which is worse for the powers that be. Economic implosion due to deflation, or inflationary measures causing the gold price to skyrocket and no doubt sucking the life out of everything else just as deflation would have done. For the moment I'm just another wage slave with no time - your thoughts would be appreciated though.
Deflation would be the biggest killer IMO. I believe their worst nightmare is a deflationary spiral. They're sh#t scared of the great depression again.
