For most experts, deflation, which they define as a general decline in prices of goods and services, is bad news since it generates expectations for a further decline in prices.
As a result, they hold, consumers postpone their buying of goods at present since they expect to buy these goods at lower prices in the future. This weakens the overall flow of spending and in turn weakens the economy.
Hence, such commentators hold that policies that counter deflation will also counter the slump.
If deflation leads to an economic slump then policies that reverse deflation should be good for the economy.
Reversing deflation would imply introducing policies that support general increases in the prices of goods, i.e., inflation. This means that inflation could actually be an agent of economic growth.
According to most experts, a little bit of inflation can actually be a good thing.Mainstream thinkers are of the view that inflation of 2% is not harmful to economic growth, but that inflation of 10% could be bad news. (Indeed the Fed’s inflation target is 2%.)
Thus, we can conclude that at a rate of inflation of 10%, it is likely that consumers are going to form rising inflation expectations.
According to popular thinking, in response to a high rate of inflation, consumers will speed up their expenditure on goods at present, which should boost economic growth.
So why then is a rate of inflation of 10% or higher regarded by experts as a bad thing?
Clearly there is a problem with the popular definitions of inflation and deflation.
Inflation is Not Essentially a Rise in Prices
Inflation is not about general increases in prices as such, but about the increase in the money supply. As a rule the increase in money supply sets in motion general increases in prices. This, however, need not always be the case.
The price of a good is the amount of money asked per unit of it. For a constant amount of money and an expanding quantity of goods, prices will actually fall.
Prices will also fall when the rate of increase in the supply of goods exceeds the rate of increase in the money supply. For instance, if the money supply increases by 5% and the quantity of goods increases by 10%, prices will fall by 5%, ceteris paribus.
A fall in prices in this example cannot conceal the fact that we have an inflation of 5% here on account of the increase in the money supply.
L’Observateur du Maroc et d’Afrique a interrogé Philippe de Villiers :
Depuis quelques mois, l’Europe est secouée par de nombreux attentats. Comment réagissez-vous à ces évènements ? L’Europe, la vraie, celle des nations, est submergée de l’extérieur et effondrée de l’intérieur. Submergée de l’extérieur, parce qu’on a transféré notre souveraineté à des institutions obscures. J’ai entendu François Hollande dire : « On va faire ceci, on va faire cela…» Mais il sait très bien qu’il ment, puisqu’il n’a plus de pouvoir. Quand le pouvoir n’a plus le pouvoir, il ne peut plus rien faire pour nous. On a transféré les souverainetés nationales. On est un protectorat américain. La France est submergée de l’extérieur, puisqu’elle fait face à une invasion migratoire. Les gens qui viennent chez nous sont envoyés par l’État islamique, qui – c’est la vérité – nous avait promis en février dernier de nous expédier ces gens. C’était annoncé. On a devant nous des envahisseurs. Il n’y a pas de chrétiens parmi ces gens-là. Les chrétiens restent chez eux et combattent pour leurs familles, leurs terres et leurs valeurs.
Quels sont selon vous les responsables ?
Les BHL de service, des Attali et consorts qui expliquent que la France est une tache ignominieuse sur la carte des points précieux de la planète. Un pays qui n’a plus de contours et plus de compteurs ne reste plus et meurt. Les hommes politiques ont abattu lesmurs porteurs comme le caractère sacré de la vie, la filiation comme repère, la nation comme héritage, la frontière comme ancrage et le rêve français comme fenêtre sur le monde.
Vous ciblez particulièrement l’Union européenne…
Je dis que tous ceux qui ont dit la vérité sur l’Europe, par-delà leurs défauts ou leurs défaillances, et qui étaient peu ou prou souverainistes, c’est-à-dire qui pensaient que la France ne pouvait rien faire par elle-même si elle ne le faisait pas elle-même, sont partis ou sont morts. Ceux qui restent et qui sont au premier plan sont tous des tricheurs et des menteurs. En fait les fédéralistes voulaient supprimer les nations et les frontières, non pas pour les remplacer par une super frontière ou par une superpuissance, mais pour fondre et diluer l’espace européen dans un grand marché planétaire avec une gouvernance mondiale dirigée par le capitalisme américain.
Selon vous l’immigration massive est responsable de l’insécurité…
J’avais longuement parlé de cette question avec le roi Hassan II qui était un grand homme d’Etat et un visionnaire. Il avait la prescience des dégâts qui allaient être causés par l’immigration massive non seulement en Europe mais aussi en Afrique. «C’est une erreur d’analyse globale», m’avait-il dit. Tout comme il ne se faisait pas d’illusions sur une prétendue «intégration» qui, selon lui, était un leurre.
Vous avez aujourd’hui énormément de jeunes européens et africains qui ont compris qu’ils ont été floués. Ils en sont conscients. Une société se sauve, non pas par des mises en garde, mais par des réalisations que l’on accroche à contre-pente. Il y a donc des écoles parallèles, des médias parallèles, une culture parallèle, etc. Par la force des choses, on va avoir une contre-société, avec des pensées indépendantes, qui vont former des résistants attachés à la transmission. En Europe comme en Afrique.
Ce que je vous dis, c’est ce que m’avait aussi prédit Soljenitsyne en 1996. C’est comme cela que les choses se sont passées dans les pays de l’Est sous la botte communiste et en Union soviétique.
Comment faut-il réagir au terrorisme islamique ?
Je n’ai pas peur des mots : les hommes politiques européens ont du sang sur les mains. Je suis convaincu que si les relations diplomatiques avec la Syrie avaient été rétablies, on aurait eu les renseignements sur les cerveaux des attentats. Et si le contrôle aux frontières avait été rétabli, on aurait empêché les allers et venues des kalachnikovs et des terroristes.
Comment analysez-vous les positions occidentales sur les dossiers syriens et libyens ?
Je pense que la position européenne calquée sur la position américaine repose sur un contresens. L’Europe écrit depuis la fin de la guerre son avenir sur le continent américain. L’OTAN nous entraîne dans des aventures partout dans le monde qui ne sont pas les nôtres. Aujourd’hui il faut faire une Europe confédérale, c’est-à-dire celle qui s’appuie sur les souverainetés nationales à l’Est comme à l’Ouest, qui s’élargisse à la Russie qui peut servir d’interface pour les hommes de la puissance de demain. Il est absurde de considérer aujourd’hui Poutine et la Russie comme des ennemis. La Russie est non seulement une alliée sur le plan historique, mais il y a des liens plus profonds – par exemple, Dostoïevski parlait français, écrivait en français. Et moi qui connais bien la Russie, je peux dire que c’est une absurdité de ne pas vouloir réunir les deux chrétientés de l’Europe – celle de l’Est et celle de l’Ouest.
L’Europe ne doit pas continuer à se faire manipuler par l’Amérique qui elle est agressive, qui dépense deux fois plus pour son budget militaire que l’ensemble des nations du monde. L’OTAN est en fait le bras militaire de l’Amérique. Souvenez-vous du Kosovo, des «printemps arabes», de la Syrie, de l’Irak. Il faut bien comprendre que le nouveau monde dans lequel nous sommes entrés n’est pas le monde de l’après-guerre. L’OTAN a été créée pour contrer l’Union soviétique. L’URSS est morte, le mur de Berlin est tombé, cela fait des décennies.
La décomposition de l’Europe va maintenant aller très vite depuis le Brexit
Il faut bien comprendre par exemple que Madame Merkel obéit à Monsieur Obama, obéit à l’OTAN quand elle se prosterne devant le sultan Erdogan parce que la Turquie est membre à part entière de l’OTAN et que c’est l’Amérique qui veut faire rentrer la Turquie dans l’Union européenne. Quand vous confiez votre défense, c’est-à-dire l’essentiel de votre puissance régalienne, à une autre nation que la vôtre – en l’occurrence les Etats-Unis – alors vous n’êtes plus indépendant. Donc vous ne pouvez plus avoir une diplomatie propre. C’est tragique pour la France et c’est tragique pour l’Europe, pour l’Afrique et pour le Moyen-Orient.
Barack Obama a récemment appelé l’OTAN à agir contre Daesh, la Russie et le Brexit. Selon vous, pourquoi le président américain met ces trois phénomènes dans le même panier ?
Obama dit n’importe quoi. Mais cela ne date pas d’aujourd’hui. Mettre dans le même panier le Brexit, Daesh et la Russie, c’est montrer qu’on ne comprend rien en histoire, qu’on est inculte. On ne peut pas commenter une position comme celle-là.
L’Amérique a une vision du monde qui est la même, c’est-à-dire un monde mono-centré sur l’Amérique, alors que la Russie accepte le monde poly-centré et travaille pour cela. Dans la conversation que j’ai eue avec Vladimir Poutine en août 2014, il m’a dit qu’il ne voulait pas un monde centré-américain, mais un monde qui soit organisé en pôles régionaux. C’est beaucoup plus sûr pour la paix. ................ Lirela suite: lobservateurdumaroc.info
Note: The following article is from a chapter in Dom van Zeller’s Suffering: The Catholic Answer, available from Sophia Institute Press. It is reprinted with permission.
Psychologists tell us that one of the chief evils of our age, an evil apparently less evident in earlier ages, is that of easy defeat. Be this as it may, most people who are honest with themselves would probably have to admit to indulging in despondency. They are fortunate if they have nothing worse to confess than despondency; there are many who labor under the weight of near-despair. Whether guilty of surrendering to the temptation or whether burdened with a sense of guilt that in fact is without foundation, a man can reduce his spiritual vitality so as virtually to close his soul to the operation of hope. When hope dies, there is very little chance for faith and charity.
It is a commonplace to observe that the saints were not those who never fell, but those who never gave in to their falls. It is less generally understood that the saints felt just the same longing as we do for the excuse to go on falling. The parable of the wheat and the cockle should show us that the saints were not only as divided against themselves interiorly as we are, but that they had to go on struggling all their lives against the desire to let the cockle have its way.
A mistake we make is to think of the saints as triumphing over temptation by the felt force of ardent love. Some of them, certainly, experienced this fire, but for the most of them it has been a question of grinding out dry, hard acts of faith and hope through clenched teeth. The saints have had to fight every inch of the way against discouragement, defeatism, and even despair. Virtue Grows Through Trials
How could it be otherwise? No virtue can be productive of good unless it comes up against the evil that is its opposite. Courage is not courage until it has experienced fear: courage is not the absence of fear, but the sublimation of fear. In the same way, perseverance has to be tried by the temptation to give up, by the sense of failure, by an inability to feel the support of grace. The reason Christ fell repeatedly — one tradition would have it that He fell seven times — is at least partly because we fall repeatedly and have need of His example in recovering from our falls. The difference between His falls and ours is that, whereas His were because of weakness of the body, ours are because of weakness of the will. The likeness between His and ours lies simply in the use that can be made of them.
Even if we do not reproduce the Passion in any other respect, we have the chance of reproducing it in perseverance under exhaustion. If, as we have seen, the Passion is constantly being renewed in the members of Christ’s Mystical Body, there must always be some aspect of Christ’s suffering to which our own personal sufferings can show an affinity. If we are bearing witness to the same truth, opposing the same evil, moving in the same direction, then the same means must be used by us as those that were used by Christ — namely, patience and endurance in the all-but-defeating experience of life. The effort that we make to regain the position lost by either circumstances or sin will reflect the effort made by Christ to return to the interrupted work of cross-bearing. Nothing of our experience need be wasted, not even our sinfulness.
So it would seem that the truly Christian man transcends discouragement only by accepting it. No man can pass beyond an obstacle except by facing it and rising above it. To go around an obstacle is not to overcome it, but to evade it. Circumvention may be all right when we are traveling along a road, but it will not do when we are advancing toward God by the way of the Cross.
UK police commissioner pushes for mandatory sex-ed in primary school
by Lianne Laurence
“today’s primary-school children have been targeted to become tomorrow’s teenagers in the queue for abortions and morning-after pills”
The newly elected chair of the United Kingdom’s Association of Police and Crime Commissioners is pushing for compulsory sex education in all schools, including primary, stating that children must be taught to protect themselves from sexual predators.
Vera Baird launched her lobby in a Guardian August 1 op-ed, warning of the skyrocketing costs of investigating a “dramatic escalation” of reported child sexual abuse cases in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Re-elected in May as Police and Crime Commissioner in England’s northeast district of Northumbria, Baird asked those who “care about protecting our young people” to get in touch with her: “It may be we can tip the desirable into the attainable if we act together now.”
But Anthony Ozimic, communications director for the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), says the new APCC chair was a minister in Tony Blair’s Labour government and “is a hard-core anti-life/anti-family apparatchik.”
And she “is using the issue of child abuse as a red herring to promote the sexual rights agenda,” Ozimic told LifeSiteNews in an email.
Contrary to what Baird claims,“exposing pre-pubescent children to information about sex will not protect them from abuse but may well in fact lead them to being sexualized,” he observed.
“It is no coincidence that the abortion and contraception industry is among one of the most vocal supporters of compulsory sex education,” Ozimic said. “Groups like IPPF, the Family Planning Association and Brook have carefully prepared sex education materials which they know will provide them with a steady stream of clients for years to come.”
According to Baird, Britain’s Operation Hydrant — the national hub coordinating several ongoing police investigations into reports of non-recent child sexual abuse by public figures or within public institutions — will be investigating 200,000 cases by 2020 “if current trends of reporting continue.”
Reporting such cases has burgeoned since the government established the Goddard inquiry in January 2015, which projected a five-year scrutiny into alleged incidents of institutional child sexual exploitation. (Justice Lowell Goddard, however, just announced herresignation.)
The inquiry was launched in response to the Savile scandal. After a damning police investigation, a BBC inquiry concluded in early 2014 that Savile, a television presenter and DJ who died in October 2011 at age 84, had sexually abused and raped thousands of girls and boys on BBC premises, as well as in hospitals and schools.
Now the “annual cost of child sexual abuse investigations is already more than £1bn – and, if the projected rise in reporting materialises, could be £3bn by 2020,” wrote Baird.
She added that “we need compulsory PSHE [personal, social and health education] to protect future generations from harmful behavior that, in the post-Savile era, we now realize has blighted so many lives.”
“Taught well,” sex education would “give children who are victims of abuse the education to judge earlier that it is wrong and develop the confidence to report,” Baird said.
UK schools are currently obliged to provide sex education “only from the age of 11 and only in maintained schools, not academies,” she wrote.
A look inside 4 important goals of the LGBT movement
by Kelsey Harkness
Despite being proud of advances they’ve made during eight years under President Barack Obama, leaders of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement say they still have work to do.
“The future of the LGBT movement hinges largely on the outcome of this election,” Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Arcus Foundation, said at a global LGBT summit held in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention.
Jennings, issuing a warning to a mostly friendly audience, said there are “two very different visions for LGBT equality in the Republican and Democratic platforms.”
More than 25 prominent leaders of the national LGBT movement, including elected officials and other influential voices, gathered for the four-day event called the Equality Forum.
The Daily Signal attended several panel discussions featuring speakers such as Janson Wu, executive director of the advocacy group GLAD; James Esseks, director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and AIDS project at the American Civil Liberties Union; and Evan Wolfson, former president of Freedom to Marry, a campaign largely credited with winning the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Looking forward, speakers said, priorities include defeating “anti-LGBT” bills, supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth through new school policies and curriculum and partnering with outside organizations on minority-driven issues such as gun control and criminal justice reform. They called for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to add protections in places of public accommodation, among other changes.
LGBT advocacy groups also are involved in an array of lawsuits they believe could have a major impact, including a Pennsylvania case where a transgender women alleges discrimination by her former employer.
The Equality Forum didn’t conclude without controversy. As panelists talked about outreach to millennials, blacks, and other minorities, one reporter stood up and asked why, if they care so much about diversity, was their panel composed of four middle-aged white men?
After the horror of Nice David Kilcullen’s Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror provides a superb means of untangling the mess that is the legacy of this tragic conflict. Kilcullen provides advice for the future, cutting edge-analysis and an insightful, readable resource.
My interest in this book was piqued when I heard an interview with Kilcullen on the radio well before publication. The clarity and authority of his analysis was striking. This derives from Kilcullen’s on-the-ground experience with insurgency. Kilcullen worked prior to 9/11 as an Australian infantry officer on Indonesian Islamic insurgency. Subsequently he became a counterinsurgency advisor to Condaleeza Rice; advised David Patraeus during the 2007 “Surge”; and was a chief strategist in the US State Department.
Predictably, Kilcullen is critical of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 which he calls, “the greatest screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia”. He is even more critical of the failure to follow the invasion with a viable post-conflict solution arguing that, “The bare-bones invasion force Rumsfeld had insisted upon was enough to push Saddam off his perch, but not to contain the chaos after his fall”.
Kilcullen describes post-conflict planning as criminally shabby. He claims that detailed study of post-conflict risks or costs would have undermined the rationale for the war. Kilcullen is glowing about the quality of contemporary American intelligence which was extraordinarily prescient when viewed in hindsight. But he is less than impressed by “the wilful naiveté of the group of policy makers around Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney” who thwarted those best placed to point the way forward.
Anticipating George W. Bush becoming this book’s whipping boy, I was surprised by Kilcullen’s opinion of the former president. Kilcullen writes of experiencing a very different president to the one who took the US into Iraq in 2003 when Bush took personal charge of the US in Iraq in 2007:
Tampa was a coalition conference … and the president spoke after lunch on the first day. He was singularly unimpressive at first: folksy, shallow and upbeat in a way that facts on the ground simply didn’t justify. But after he finished his remarks he asked the reporters and television cameras to leave. As soon as the doors closed his voice changed … He showed a comprehensive grasp of both tactical-level detail and the big picture and… a clear understanding of exactly what was, and was not, working on the ground … It was a tour de force of coalition leadership p… [Another] illustration of the president’s leadership was his focused engagement, epitomised by near-daily phone calls and weekly videoconferences with General Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi leaders.
There is no such respect for President Obama, grudging or otherwise. Kilcullen sees Obama as an arch-vacillator whose Administration has been passive, indecisive and strategically confused in the face of catastrophe. He threw away the hard-won progress of the Surge.
Blood Year ranges from Afghanistan to Iraq, with a mountain of detail and plenty of exotic names. It requires a focused reader with a stomach for psychotic violence. But the book’s challenge is eased by Kilcullen’s easy, journalistic style. He writes engagingly and the chapters are tightly written.
At each stage of his rise to power, Vladimir Putin demonstrated an understanding of both the Russian psyche and the tactical conditions of the post-Soviet world.
https://youtu.be/nY3Uz4ELwM0
Editor’s note: The following article is the first of a special CWR series on post-Soviet Russia, the rise of Vladimir Putin, the role of religion in Putin’s political project, the rise of right-wing extremism under Putin, and the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
It has been 16 years since Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin rose to the top of political power in post-Soviet Russia. Now, a reawakened, even revanchist Russia has asserted herself in Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, Armenia, and Ukraine. Ancient Russian fears—of encirclement, of penetration by Western political and social values and practices, and of internal dissent and disunity—have reemerged. Despite hopes generated by the tentative democratic reforms of Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia has returned to a top-down, or “vertical” authoritarianism typical of her past. A “little Cold War” seems to be aborning.
But if he is no democrat, what kind of leader is Putin and what kind will he be? Was he an inevitable choice in 2000 when he unexpectedly and quickly became the president of post-Soviet Russia? And, if so, is he the inevitable man of Russia’s future?
In this article I will examine the first question: how could an obscure Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB reach the top so rapidly? But before we begin, let’s admit that, as Americans, we bring some handicaps to this inquiry. I remember vividly the heady years of 1985-1991, during which I was several times in the Soviet Union, when the turbulence of the Gorbachev/Yeltsin era first cracked, then blew apart the brittle shell of Soviet power. As the final scenes of that history-making period played out, one could understand the exhalations of relief from the West, and from the United States especially, as the tensions of the 40-year test of nerves that we call the Cold War were released.
Americans, always ready to abandon any extended attention to affairs distant from their historically protected shores, promptly declared a new day, free at last, not only from the threat of nuclear war, but beyond that, from the long, bloody 20th-century struggles with imperialism, fascism, National Socialism and communism. Liberal economics and constitutional democracy were declared triumphant, [1] Russia would abandon her authoritarian past, and that, as we say, was that. Only, it wasn’t.
