Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, October 14, 2010

The little peopple can suck on it

By Dave Anderson:


One of the major problems in the US economy is that most personal balance sheets are crappy right now.  They are slowly improving from their worst state as some bad debts are being discharged and some debts are being paid down.  However most people are still concentrating their marginal dollars on balance sheet clean-up by either saving the money or paying down expensive debts. 


A fairly simple way to accelerate personal balance sheet clean-up in the US economy is for their to be nominal wage growth and nominal economic growth in addition to the current real growth.  A decent bit of inflation makes paying back a fixed rate nominal debt much easier in the intermediate run.  Moderate wage and income growth in the form of inflation plus real wage gains makes it easier for families to either pay back the same percentage of their nominal income to debt service, which would accelerate the clean-up, or to pay the same nominal amount while increasing their consumption elsewhere. 


The mild losers in a world of 3% or 4% inflation and 6% or 7% non-inflation adjusted growth are the bond holders who are betting on 1.0% or less inflation over the intermediate term. 


A Federal Reserve principal wants to make the little people suck on it and continue the transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 10% by aggressively seeking to opportunistically disinflate the economy:


[I]nflation is now on target, as far as I'm concerned. Over the last 12 months the price index for personal consumption expenditure has risen 1.5 percent, which is exactly what I've been recommending for the last six years....


Calculated Risk notes that his inflation index is significantly higher than the two major inflation measures used by most analysts.  But the short take-away is that a major, albeit, non-voting member of the Federal Reserve is keen to be an inflation hawk even when the economy needs a decent jolt of inflation.  No inflation or deflation is a means of enriching the creditor class by drying out the debtor classes. 


We can suck on it. 



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