"As I've said before, my expectation is that commodity price increases that are now translating into accelerating headline inflation will be transitory. In support of this claim, I'll make three points. First, these increases have been driven by global pressures in markets for food commodities, energy, and other commodities. These pressures are largely the result of supply-and-demand factors, some of which are one-off in nature. Second, inflation indices are made up of a wide spectrum of goods and services that don't uniformly have these commodities as inputs. Roughly two-thirds of consumer spending is on services, which are not materials-intensive. And, third, to the extent that some goods and services have these commodity inputs, the pass-through to ultimate consumer prices is limited." - Atlanta Fed President LockhartApparently, the leaders of our fearless Fed are living in an alternate universe and in addition are just a nother shining example of academic failure. Academia has much less validity than experience. Moreover, pure BS like Lockhart's quote "some of which are one-off in nature" are beyond assinine. Yes, I only want to buy cotton and rice on a one off basis because I was extra cold and hungry that day. I am willing to bet than none of these Fed guys could trade, manage or run a business on their own...yet they are pontificating and playing with 300 million American lives and quite a few non-american lives, as we can see in the middle east and North Africa.
Transports have been down for the last five days in a row...despite a lot of effort by the bullish set to push the major indexes higher.
