Last week the White House did a weird proactive talking point seminar on Monday, preparing the media for official unemployment data which would follow four days later. {Go Deep} Everything about the new econ talking points, added to the press briefing book, indicates the White House knows it’s the economic policy that is the most politically damaging for them.

Today, the same proactive approach to head off negative economic consequences is evident, this time regarding inflation.  Tomorrow, the official Bureau of Labor and Statistics inflation numbers will be released for January and for 2021 in total.  The White House has been again tipped-off.

Watch how Jen Psaki attempts to proactively establish the talking point about the month-over-month rate of inflation change as the important element to focus on.  If you’ve read the previous post, you can clearly see what they are doing now.  Also, this is entirely scripted and coordinated with the press pool to ask a very specific question.  WATCH, prompted:

You only need to watch for a minute or two to see the strings on the marionettes.

It’s also worth noting, the people behind Joe Biden were meeting with energy executives today to work out the terms and conditions for their bribes from the White House to trigger the Green New Deal.  The energy company bribe amounts, known as direct subsidies in the talking points, were being negotiated as Psaki was talking to the press pool.

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Whenever we discuss inflation, it is absolutely critical for people to understand that inflation itself is the measure of the percentage increase in a price over a period of time.

It is entirely possible, I would say absolutely guaranteed, that prices will increase even more this year as inflation begins to drop. This will be the economic story on the backside of the inflation hurricane as the Fed starts to increase interest rates. Example:

♦ 2021: A loaf of bread increases in price 50¢ from $1.00 to $1.50, a rate of inflation of 50%.

♦ 2022: That same loaf of bread increases in price by 60¢, from $1.50 to $2.10, a rate of inflation at 40%.

The price of the bread increased more in 2022 than 2021, but the rate of inflation dropped from 50% to 40%.

The White House and Federal Reserve state, correctly, that inflation is likely to drop.  However, the actual prices of the products are rising at a greater rate. This is the critical component of the inflation story that will remain with us throughout 2022.  Inflation is not measuring the increase in the price of an item.  Inflation is measuring the rate of the price increase as a percentage.

This is the context for the Federal Reserve to state today, they “hope” inflation slows down, because they are going to raise interest rates regardless of what is happening with the price of goods and services:

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Liberal MP Joël Lightbound lightly criticized some of the stances of Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday.  Within hours, the peer and party pressure upon him led to his removal from his position as Chairman of the Quebec caucus.

Lightbound encouraged the Trudeau government to provide targets to lifting restrictions; he was not implying that public health measures should be lifted immediately. He also committed the cardinal sin against COVID by asking for epidemiological data behind restrictions to be published, so people can see the information determining what measures need to be in place.

Transparency is against the interests of those within the government who weaponize covid fear.  The Liberal MP also spoke about the ongoing anti-mandate protests that started as a response to cross-border vaccine mandates, saying that messaging amid the demonstrations is dividing Canadians.  WATCH:

“I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions. This is not a risk we ought to be taking lightly.  I have enough respect for my fellow Canadians not to engage in these easy and absurd labels.”

The response was immediate and severe.  There can be no dissent from leftist orthodoxy.

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People are starting to catch on.  First, how it is surfacing:

(Zero Hedge) ...”traders are paying bumper premiums for immediate supply” … “Commodities are severely undersupplied” … “The shortage of, well, everything has translated into record price of virtually all commodities: the Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index, which tracks 23 energy, metals and crop futures, has touched a record this year. That has been driven in part by surging oil prices, which have hit their highest level since 2014.” (read more)

CTH readers are specifically well positioned to understand what is happening in the background we have discussed two specific issues:

(1) In any era of hyper-inflation, we always see the advanced purchasing of inventory for profit.  Meaning, when prices are quickly rising multinationals use their size and power over commodity goods to store, physically or through contracted future purchases, goods that are held until a specific target price is reached and then sold for a bigger profit.  In 2022 the “supply chain disruption” is being used as a cover.

(2) In the modern era, the major multinationals control the supply of originating products.  There’s no such thing as a free market. In the modern era it is a controlled market.

Long before the word “inflation” hit the 2021 headlines, April/May of last year, CTH specifically identified where we are right now.

In the background right now, the multinationals are exploiting the two issues above.  The Zero Hedge article “Shortages of Everything” is discussing the surfacing symptom, i.e. goods traders willing to pay premium prices to secure inventories, not necessarily the root cause.

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In the fall of 2021, Dr. Ponesse saw her academic career of 20 years fall apart after she refused to comply with a Canadian university’s COVID vaccine mandate. In response, Dr. Ponesse recorded a special video directed to her first-year ethics students. That video went viral.

Since the release of that video, Dr. Ponesse has joined The Democracy Fund as the Pandemic Ethics Scholar focusing on educating the public on civil liberties.  Yesterday she joined Jordan Peterson for a discussion of the current situation in Canada, the Freedom Protests and what might lay ahead.  WATCH:

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Neil Oliver provides another commonsense monologue highlighting the insanity of continuing COVID regulations against a citizenry that is well past the point of letting it go.  “Weapons of Mass Distraction”

Indeed, the government leaders who take their instructions from the multinational corporations in charge of the World Economic Forum, which is to say almost all of them, are so entrenched in their need to use COVID-19 as the prybar for the Build Back Better agenda, they simply cannot let it go.

Without COVID-19 they can’t keep the vaccination push.  Without the vaccination push they can’t keep the vaccine passport process in place.  Without the vaccination passport registration process to track and monitor human behavior, the governing authorities cannot fulfill the mission of a comprehensive digital identity and social credit tracking system.  Indeed, everything they seek is contingent upon keeping the premise of COVID-19 alive.

It is not accidental the World Economic Forum is at the epicenter of this.  WATCH:

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Gasoline prices have risen, on average, 40% in the past 11 months.  This leads to higher consumer costs across the board.  Oil, currently $90/barrel, is going to go even higher as a merge of Biden economic, regulatory, energy and foreign policies are going to make things worse.

As the Obama-Biden administration previously said when they achieved their last historic increase in gas prices, “U.S. energy prices will necessarily skyrocket“, in order to achieve their ideological climate change objectives.

(VIA CNBC) Gas prices rose to the highest level in more than seven years Friday, on the heels of the U.S. oil benchmark topping $90 per barrel for the first time since 2014. 

The national average for a gallon of gas stood at $3.423 on Friday, according to AAA, slightly surpassing the prior high-water mark of $3.422 from Nov. 8.  Friday’s price means consumers are now paying the most at the pump since Sept. 10, 2014, AAA data shows.

The national average stood at $2.44 a year ago.  The rapid rise in prices is contributing to inflationary fears across the economy and is creating a headache for the Biden administration. (read more)

Yes, a president can and does control the price of gasoline.  What can a U.S. President and administration specifically do?  We have abundant U.S. energy resources.  Quite literally the strongest in the entire world.

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There really isn’t an adequate way to encapsulate what the Bureau of Labor and Statistics has done with their reported January jobs result [Main Data Here].   If you want a deep weeds review of the actuarial scheme deployed READ THIS ARTICLE.

In my lifetime of reviewing data and analytics, I have never reviewed a level of statistical manipulation that even comes close to this.  Well, at least not since the 1980’s junk bond valuations used for corporate restructuring and asset removal.  What the BLS produced today will likely go down in the annals of actuarial history as one of the most comprehensively fraudulent manipulations of labor and statistics in history.

In order to get to a point of being able to claim 467,000 job gains last month, the BLS needed to revise four years’ worth of claimed jobs and population data. By subtracting over a million prior jobs from 2021, essentially wiping out the COVID pandemic monthly impact, and by changing the workforce population over the same number of years, the BLS was able to recalculate the current number of people in the workforce and claim 467,000 jobs were recently created.

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President Donald Trump sits down for an extensive interview with Rob Schmitt from Newsmax.  The conversation covers a variety of current topics from foreign policy, Ukraine, Russia to the state of the U.S. economy, oil prices and the border crisis.

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The business and financial wires are melting down today as ADP Payrolls, the nation’s largest private sector payroll providing service, releases data from January showing a drop of 301,000 jobs.  [ADP Raw Data Here]

The financial, economic and business pundits are completely caught off guard and using the words “shocked”, “unexpected” and “surprised,” within their analysis.  These employment numbers just don’t align with an economy growing at 6.9%, as measured by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).  However, for CTH readers who have carefully scrutinized the economic claims and looked at the bigger picture through the prism of kitchen table checkbook economics, these results are not a surprise.

Every sector of the employment picture on Main Street USA is hit.  The pundits, following the narrative first seeded by the White House on Monday, are pointing to Omicron as the justification inside their review.  That’s nonsense.  For the better part of seven months these same pundits first claimed Delta, then shifted to Omicron as a way to explain the structurally weak economy.  All of that is nonsense.

What we are witnessing are the outcomes of massive inflation now hitting the labor market.  A drop in demand, and a subsequent drop in the employment of goods and services, is an unavoidable outcome of inflationary pressure on wages.

Let me say it again, on a macro level, natural consumer DEMAND has dropped – we are only now starting to see it surfacing in the statistical measures.

This is why White House spokesperson Jen Psaki made that weird statement on Monday.

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