I was at our local Safeway store earlier, buying a few groceries, and once again felt slightly alarmed by the fact that a very small bag of groceries ended up costing over $60.
It's not the first time I've noticed that there were a few items that I hadn't bought in a while that had had some very sharp price increases.
In particular, there's a kind of sausage we like to get for when we have a "cold cuts" dinner that used to be $2.69 a pound as recently as 12 to 18 months ago, and when I got some today it was $4.99 a pound.
That is a price increase — or "inflation" — that seems utterly and completely disconnected from any kind of official reporting on inflation. What's more, it is completely disconnected from even some of the "shadow figures" you can find online, as reported by organizations who don't use the government's filtered statistics.
I have reached a point where the lies about the financial state of affairs is more worrisome than the actual inflation. Heck, there's still food we can afford, and we grow a fair bit of our own, mostly from seeds we harvest from the previous year's garden.
So it's not about going hungry or anything that dramatic.
But it seems to me that "somebody" somewhere is working awfully hard to hide reality as much as possible. "Yes, everything is fine!" (even though the house is on fire).
Not entirely sure how "fine" everything is, anymore.
Another Market Tumble...
Meanwhile, the crypto markets took another dump, and the "Usual Suspects" are once again running around shouting "Buy the dip! Buy the dip!"
Dip???
This doesn't look like a "dip" to me. A "dip" suggests to me that there's reasonably strong evidence for an imminent uptrend. Absent that, "buying the dip" sounds more like "throwing good money after bad," to me.
And the punters who are out there talking about the bear market "coming to an end" must be high on Hopium.
Historically, there has been four years between high points.
Let's Review:
- BTC went from about $80 to near $1,000 in late 2013.
- BTC went from about $2,500 to near $20,000 in late 2017.
- BTC went from about $5,500 to near $65,000 in late 2021.
Unless I'm just really bad at math, I don't see anything much happening until the 2nd half of 2025. Which isn't to say we won't be having some false starts and stops along the way...
This is definitely not investment advice, but my guess would be that we'll have $18,000 to $40,000 BTC until mid-2025, and then we'll see a new top at around $200,000, maybe more.
I'm sure there are legions of TA experts who want to disagree and insist that the "nose hair oscillator is approaching a death cross with the 100-day moving average of the surface area of butterfly wings" suggests something else. Which is fine.
My point is that the shorter you make your observation period, the more likely you are to be proven wrong... which doesn't sit well in an industry with a very short attention span.
Meanwhile I fear it might not be too long before a box of corn flakes is suddenly $10. And the scares me!
Thanks for visiting, and have a great Sunday!
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Created at 2023-08-20 01:08 PDT
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