Something tells me that you didn't start trading until 2003... and that you have zero comprehension of how economic cycles work... How right am I?
I thought the inflation numbers were arrived at through various "facts"... so how would it be a "lie"?
I have asked this before and they told me the inflation numbers get manipulated by the government. Ok, fine. Let's assume this is true. Then why aren't market participants seeing through all these "lies"? Why does the (free) market price in 10y forward inflation through the TIPS spread of ~2.3-2.4%?
Because the TIPS is priced off of the CPI, not real inflation. That's why. If the TIPS was actually priced off of real inflation, it would be a totally different story and you could actually hedge your inflation risk with it, now its merely a government playtoy because the government controls the CPI numbers and they get to change the rules whenever they want to. Hedonic pricing is a son of a b*tch. haha... The CPI is full of lies, you've just been drinking too much Koolaid to realize it.
Ah yes, now we get to the meat of it. CPI vs "real inflation" and how the government manipulates it. The great thing is your bearish conspiracy thesis doesn't need any arguments nor proof. It's all about dogmatic belief, just like Christianity or any other religion. Every economic fact that speaks against it is being labeled as manipulated by the government or a result of the Chinese buying of treasuries.
Tone of sarcasm, yet closer to the truth than you realize. Many private followers of inflation argue for money-pump as high as 14% annual. That's inflation, pure and simple... regardless of how Gummint manipulates information in order to influence our behavior. Check out MZM Money Stock from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. When I first considered buying a Toyota Land Cruiser, the price was $2,795. Now, $56,000. The reason for the price inflation is because the US has been in money-pump overdrive since about '82.
Okay, (I don't understand a lot of what you are saying, but I lived with a "boffin" in London for awhile in the 70s and he talked about Keynes. I think that's where the whole money pump idea came from... Yes?) Also I read an interesting book when I lived in London, called "How to Lie with Statistics" -- It talked about the very things that made me fail to "get" statistics when it was a part of psych classes. "Mean" etc. versus other ways of looking at relative numbers. (Was a Land Rover really that much less dear as recently as that?)