I am not attacking Obama, relax. No one mentioned Obama except you. Your responses to me are full of strawman arguments. We can discuss Obama in another thread if you like. The Iraq war was a decision made by President Bush.
As yehudayona points out, oil prices have been anything but stable for over 40 years.
Oil prices historically were very stable up until the Yom Kippur war, and returned to stability at the end of the Iran/Iraq war. Then from around 1988 until 2003 the price of oil stayed stable and fluctuated only in the $20-$30 range. The next period of instability started with the US invasion of Iraq. It seems that oil prices have stabilized again at this point, but at 3-4x the previous threshhold (around $100 per barrel). That is a negative consequence of the Iraq invasion in my opinion.
I said there is too much money chasing no goods and I thought you’d understand. Maybe I should have worded it as there is too much money NOT chasing goods. I thought it sounded better the first way. We definitely agree that most Americans do not think there is too much money; that was my original point. There is in fact too much money, but most Americans are not seeing it because it stayed at the top. I don’t know any way to make it clearer to you that this is the type of monetary inflation I am trying to talk about. Unless you are being deliberately defensive I would have thought you and I see eye to eye on this topic.
I didn’t cling to the CPI; I gave you the GDP deflator. You have presented no data that indicates that inflation is a problem.
I think this part of our disagreement is fairly ironic. If we were discussing Global Warming and someone presented data showing that we have had much colder winters recently (and less blazing summers), you would dismiss the data as not seeing the bigger picture. Well, I contend the same to you in this argument. Bringing me CPI figures to prove that no inflation is occurring is certainly missing the big picture. To tell me that you’ve “debunked” the inflationary effects of OMO buybacks and QE by showing me CPI is as laughable as me telling you I’ve “debunked” global warming by showing you NYC weather records.
And in case anyone has the gall to say TL;DR, do you have any idea how long it takes to type all this on a phone with OA? 🙂