The United States Department of Labor released its monthly data on inflation today at 8:30AM. The data showed that inflation rose only 0.1% over the last year, the lowest reading since 1954. I should note that oil and food prices continue to fall. Combine this with slow consumer demand which will feed through into consumer prices and you have deflation by next month.

While we should welcome lower prices, we should be aware that they are due entirely to falling demand and excess supply; that is a world of difference to deflation from productivity gains. This is the environment of depressions. The economy is looking more and more like the 1930s every day.

This is the time of year when everyone tends to look back and sum up the year in one way or another. I have been doing much of the same.

In keeping with that theme, I have taken a good look through my nearly 1400 posts to get a better sense of what I got right and what I got wrong and how knowing that can help me going forward. Call it an exercise in intellectual honesty. This exercise has given me a good understanding of where things went wrong in the past year and why.

It may also give me some thoughts as to where we need to go in 2009. Let me share a little of what I learned with you. This is a long but thoughtful post, so take a few minutes. It should be worth it.

On the whole my predictive powers were working pretty well this year. But, I made a few lousy calls and some controversial ones along the way. Below is my view of how the year went, on some of those calls and links to the relevant posts. At the end, I’ll wrap it up with a few thoughts about where that leaves my thinking for 2009.

This video from the 1930s is a timeless piece of work, giving an explanation of what inflation and deflation are and how they work. (hat tip Tim Iacono)

I recently wrote a post about U.S. Treasury securities which have been rising in price as interest rates have come down. In the post, I called the Treasury rise a bubble and I stick by that moniker despite protests from some astute readers.

However, I do want to point out one reason why Treasurys are rising. Inflation.

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I am certainly of the view that a considerable worsening of the recession is baked in the cake for 2009. But will fiscal and monetary stimulus prevent worst case scenarios? I certainly hope so, as I have laid out in recent posts.
But, don’t take my word for it. The RGE Monitor headed [...]

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Caroline Baum had a good column today at Bloomberg in which she suggests central banks consider asset prices in monetary policy going forward. In the piece she quoted William White, a former economist from the Bank for International Settlements. He said:
“The most calamitous downturns were not preceded by any degree of inflation. There [...]

My Austrian School background has been useful as a lens through which to view the credit bubble and crash. Central to this view is the precept that easy money is the problem and not the solution. However, as the crash has unfolded, I find myself parting ways with the Austrians. I have always felt the Austrians are more useful for their economic framework. But they leave me underwhelmed when it comes to solutions for when problems occur. Their “Let them eat cake” approach comes dangerously close to Andrew Mellon’s draconian Depression era prescription and is more likely to end in a deflationary spiral and a worsening of the problem.

And so it is today. If we are to find our way out of this crisis — the worst in three quarters of a century — it will not be the ideas of Ludwig von Mises or Murray Rothbard which will guide us. It is more the work of John Maynard Keynes and his followers that is likely to offer useful prescriptions. As much as I would like to look to the Austrian School in this crisis, I cannot. These are the confessions of a former Austrian Economist.

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First the Fed and now the ECB and Bank of England are talking about some form of quantitative easing! Of course, if they are all going to do it, do we have a dollar crash or is it more of a crisis of confidence in fiat currencies in general? The only obvious [...]

As interest rates in the developed economies approach the zero bound, we must begin to ask ourselves how effective monetary policy can reasonably be in these circumstances. And if policy is to be effective, which policy tools will be most advantageous to use? Or are we just pushing on a string here?

In plain English: central banks are running out of bullets and the deflation bogeyman seems to be right on our doorstep. Can they even stop him from ripping our house to shreds and sending us into depression?

In economic circles, there has been a lot of buzz about Quantitative Easing of late. Basically, the U.S. Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates to near zero percent and the fear is that these cuts will not have enough effect on the willingness to lend in order to reflate the U.S. economy. Therefore, the Fed has decided to take more draconian measures, one of which is Quantitative Easing, flooding the economy with money.