Assorted links

they also need to factor in the cost of hedging to the interest rate spread, which is an option to foreigners holding US debt.

Am I missing something, or is DeLong baldly advocating outright deception?

The potential problem is only if rising import prices make people scared of rapidly-rising inflation. This makes me think that a suggestion Greg Mankiw made once–that the Federal Reserve should focus on and disseminate not core inflation–inflation ex food ex energy–but supercore inflation–inflation ex food ex energy ex imports.

In other words, if inflation results from the dollar’s decline, just redefine it out of existence. How about supersupercore inflation, ex anything that actually goes up in price!

Categories like food and energy are already excluded from “core” inflation on grounds of volatility. This is arguably defensible, although perhaps a dubious proposition when the “volatility” lately has all been in one direction. However this so-called “supercore” inflation does not exclude goods by category, it proposes to exclude them based on their source of origin. Is there any conceivable economic rationale for redefining inflation in this way?

A car manufactured in Michigan is taken into account, while a car manufactured in a GM plant over the border in Canada isn’t? Why not use the car’s paint job instead: red cars contribute to inflation, blue ones don’t.

This drastically undercuts the intended reassuring tone of the article: if everything’s fine, why would we need to resort to shenanigans and make-believe to convince ourselves that everything’s fine?

Ah, so the Bush family was responsible for the Rwandan genocide. Just as I suspected. Wow, those guys are just like the Illuminati!