Financial Repression Watchtower

Following the advice and encouragement of some fellow Turdites, I'll be setting up an ongoing Financial Repression discussion page here in the blog forum. First I'll be posting a copy of my Main Street post from yesterday. I'll follow with a copy of another Turdite's response to it, and a comment from me in reply.

I've settled on the "Current News and Events" section of the forum because I envision this thread going forward as a place to post links to any new and topical articles on the subject, ongoing commentary on the subject, and most importantly, ongoing economic data.

If we can gather the proper resources, we should be able to monitor the current status of the Financial Repression scheme with relatively hard numbers. Just how negative are real interest rates? Or in other terms, just how severely are we being financially repressed? What is nominal GDP growth? What is real GDP growth? Where do we stand on inflation? What about nominal debt growth? Where do we find that?

Intelligent back and forth of ideas is a good thing, but I'd rather not see the thread devolve into a shouting match about what the real inflation rate is. I would be more inclined to simply state things more along the lines of "The government says it's X, Shadowstats says it's Y, a middle ground might be Z".

In the same vein, I'd rather not see the thread become a soapbox for political/economic opinions about what the gov't should do, what the Fed should do, or how the populace should respond. I'd like to keep it more grounded in what the gov't is doing, what the Fed is doing, how the populace is responding. ​Similarly, predictions about the future should be more about what actually will happen, and less about what you think would be right or wrong.

So, let's do this thing!