Yep, that was a great link, a lot to it but it did a gruesome job of summing it up. Like EHBIV, I'm recently returned from a year "outside the pot" (referring to the pot we're slowly being boiled in), and I was welcomed to a 30% increase in food prices and a 50% increase in gold. Gas was also something like $2.75 if I remember right, and they're hovering right around $3 now, although that seems to be a completely different beast. Although ammo prices aren't much different, those seemed to peak after the scramble of late '08 that lasted a bit into '09. Actually they seem to have gone down just a tad since a year ago. But I'm thinking that was more just the market normalizing after the scramble.
In '08 I also saw copper go high enough that people got desperate enough to strip wiring harnesses out of vehicles in the junkyard, which I no longer see, although I can't put a lot of confidence in that as a "yardstick" because that was only while I was in OK for 7 months. I've never seen that done up in IA, so maybe that's just something they do in the south. Made it really hard to get wiring parts for my engine swap, I had to get them all out of a car with the ominous warning "watch out, big-ass rattlesnake" painted on the window.
Although scrap doesn't seem to have gone down too much, at least not iron, as another thing my family talked about is how you just can't find a running car for under $1000 anymore. Even as recent as 2006 you could still get a driveable "beater" for $500 without too much effort. No surprise, last week at the junkyard they were advertising $395+ for cars and $240/ton scrap. Pretty sure a year before they were offering something like $175-$200 for cars tops.
After reading this, I am a lot more negative about things. Really looks like it is time to hunker down now.
I do have to hand one thing to the Keynesians, their ability to manipulate the market does appear to "soften the crash," because as far as I'm concerned it's already underway. Record unemployment and 30% increases in food, 50% increases in gold, and 50% increases in costs of the most basic transportation (still a huge indicator in my book as our culture is accustomed to commuting and thus requires basic transportation) are BAD NEWS. Right now I see our "crash" at the stages of skidding along the ground at 200 mph with a wing on fire. You can look around and most people are doing OK still, but it ain't over yet. With what appears to my amateur eyes as a "treasury bubble" fueled by TARP (and its evil spawns), and now the Euro boondoggle causing further "controlled inflation," we're skidding right towards a cliff.
The recent drop in silver and gold over the last month scares me a bit, as that seems tied to what's going on with the Euro. And of course you know what that means: with that much more of the USD invested into the Euro, when the Euro finally goes away the USD is even more toast, if that's possible. It will be interesting to see what they try to bury all this accumulated debt into next. Knowing them they will come up with something, and the cycle will repeat until something "big" happens. The review Paul posted already talks about increases in violence over the last year...
So yeah, I'm hunkering down as well. It's going down right now.
