About Time…

So I get back from my trip, and then I have an unexpected stay in my neighborhood hospital. That’s kind of a buzz-kill and it definitely keeps you tied up for a while…
Anyway, I’m back.

So I was in a taxi on my foreign trip (you know the kind of taxi ride I’m talking about – where the driver feels that signs, stoplights, and other cars are merely…”suggestions” of where he should or should not go) and in between points of near-death, my brother asks me what the conversion rate is for the dollar (you see, there was a moment for finance on my trip). I tell him what the rate is and then say that the dollar has been falling, so that it buys less where we were than it did even a few weeks ago. He then asks why, and for a moment I think: “What do I tell him? Comparative advantage, relative strength of the economies, interest rates, the trade and/or budget deficit, the over-supply of the dollar, China…?” Finally I just looked at him and said “It’s complicated.”

I’ve been doing a little research on the CPI and some of the arguments of why it is not necessarily the best indicator of inflation and some of the problems with the statistics, so for the next few days, I’ll have a little discussion…