Mystery of the missing inflation solved

[Zero Liability]

The reason there has not been high inflation is that money has gone to the bankers and on into offshore accounts.

Inflation rates depend on how wealthy you are.

And also into China. Those vaunted "savings" of theirs are US Treasuries.

[OwlHoot]

But including rent and mortgages in inflation measures would be crazy.

http://1.1.1.5/bmi/visual.ons.gov.uk...oods_FINAL.png

You ballsed up that link - It should be:

http://visual.ons.gov.uk/wp-content/...oods_FINAL.png

[BrilloPad]

The reason there has not been high inflation is that money has gone to the bankers and on into offshore accounts.

Inflation rates depend on how wealthy you are.

[PurpleGorilla]

But including rent and mortgages in inflation measures would be crazy.

http://1.1.1.5/bmi/visual.ons.gov.uk...oods_FINAL.png

[OwlHoot]

2015-06-24 The Mystery Of The "Missing" Inflation Solved: Record Number Of US Renters Can't Afford Housing

and no doubt it's much the same in the UK and EU

...

With reality diverging so massively from the government's official data, reality just had to be wrong somehow.

Turns out reality was right all along, as revealed by the latest "State of the Nation's Housing" report released by the Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, which showed that while inflation among most products and services may indeed be roughly as the Fed and BLS represent it, when it comes to rent - that most fundamental of staple costs - things have never been worse.

According to the report, for American renters 2013 marked another year with a record-high number of cost burdened households - those paying more than 30 percent of income for housing. In the United States, 20.7 million renter households (49.0 percent) were cost burdened in 2013.

It gets worse: a whopping 11.2 million, or more than a quarter of all renter households, had "severe cost burdens, paying more than half of income for housing." The median US renter household earned $32,700 in 2013 and spent $900 per month on housing costs. Renter housing costs are gross rents, which include contract rents and utilities.

From the report:

Over the span of just 10 years, the share of renters aged 25–34 with cost burdens (paying more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing) increased from 40 percent to 46 percent, while the share with severe burdens (paying more than 50 percent of income) rose from 19 percent to 23 percent. During roughly the same period, the share of renters aged 25–34 with student loan debt jumped from 30 percent in 2004 to 41 percent in 2013, with the average amount of debt up 50 percent, to $30,700.

In other words, the reason why American consumers are caught in a state of near-permanent spending depression is simple: almost half of all renters can barely afford to splurge as they are spending 30% of their income just to cover rent, a number which surges to more than half of all income for a quarter of all renting households, of which increasingly more are Millennials... Millennials whose balance sheet liabilites include over $1 trillion in student debt. ...