Input prices are running up at nearly twice the rate of the official CPI figure. Prices for goods imported from overseas are rising nearly four times as fast.

Consumers and central banks are both trapped. Central banks want to lower rates and increase liquidity in order to stimulate a sagging economy. But their inflation no longer swells assets prices and nourishes economic growth; now it leaks into consumer prices.

The socialization of the mortgage business may be a vote-getting idea in any housing downturn.  In an election year, it is unstoppable.

Bill Bonner writes that the cure for high oil prices is still high oil prices.

Retail sales actually went up last month.  How is that even possible?

If emerging market economies can continue growing at their current pace, perhaps they will spare the United States a serious correction.  American consumers will finally be able to relax.  The whole world economy will no longer rest on their backs.

American consumers are buying less from the rest of the world.  This leaves less U.S. money in the hands of foreign central banks, and less reason for them to inflate their own currencies.

Fortune magazine reports that Warren Buffett has bet a hedge fund management business that it will not outperform the S&P 500 over the next 10 years.

In the war between inflation and deflation, Friday was a bloody day.

What happens when one bubble runs into another one?  Which bubble survives?  Or the bubble in the people who buy them?