How inflation is turning breakfast into a luxury item

02-02-2011 • finance.fortune.cnn.com

Now setting aside the inconvenient truth that there's never been a global economic powerhouse that has devalued its way to prosperity, let's give the Bernanke a little something to bring to his dance with America's new chair of the US Financial Services Sub-Committee on Domestic Monetary Policy, Ron Paul, on February 9th. Here are the 6-month price percentage moves in some of the things people need to live with: Cotton = +125.7% Sugar = +82.6% Corn = +59.0% Coffee = +41.4% Rice = +40.5% Oats = +36.6% Copper = +36.1% Lumber = +33.8% Oil = +25.1% Yeah, I guess for the sake of professional policy makers in DC who get dinner for free and a car service to work, I should stop there. To make the Top 10 things that may or may not be considered "luxury things," you really need to have inflated on the order of 25% or more. Pork bellies are only up 10.7% in the last 6 months – so go have yourself some powdered Keynesian Kool-Aid with some sausage links for lunch and like it. Over that same 6-month period the dollar has dropped almost 6% and now has an inverse correlation to the price of rice and wheat.