Government statistics are a crap shoot, but efforts to adjust them to reality indicate both inflation and the economy are doing worse than indicated. From Peter St. Onge and Jeffrey Tucker at brownstoneinstitute.org:
There was an oblique message buried in a New York Times story on the growing crisis in commercial real estate in cities. Yes, this is exactly the kind of article that people pass over because it seems like it doesn’t have broad application. In fact, it does. It affects the core of issues like our city skylines, how we think about urbanism and progress, where we vacation and work, and whether the big cities are drivers or drains on national productivity.
The note mentions the “broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches of high interest rates, which make it harder to refinance loans, and low occupancy rates for office buildings — an outcome of the pandemic.”
We are used to this kind of language blaming the pandemic for the results of lockdowns. Of course, it was a man-made decision to turn a respiratory virus into an excuse to shut down the world. The lockdowns blew up all economic data, generating seesawing graphs on every indicator never seen in industrial history. They also made before/after comparison extremely difficult.
The consequences will echo long into the future. The high interest rates are a result of trying to slow down the money spigot unleashed in March 2020, in which more than $6 trillion in new cash appeared out of nowhere and was distributed as if by helicopter.
What did the money injection do? It generated inflation. How much? Sadly, we do not know. The Bureau of Labor Statistics simply cannot keep up, partially because the Consumer Price Index does not calculate the following: interest on anything, taxes, housing, health insurance (accurately), homeowners insurance, car insurance, government services like public schools, shrinkflation, quality declines, substitutions due to price, or additional service fees.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Have the ever revealed how much fiat shekels were printed during the more for them less for us COV-LARP or one *preshus* spiky ball to rule them all?
Is that meme of the not so happy fun ball the actual picture of the dastardly Black Death 2.0? (gasp!)
All-in money printing totaled $13 trillion: $5.2 for COVID + $4.5 for quantitative easing + $3 for infrastructure. Mountains of money cause inflation
Inflation causes increases in interest rates, lowering bond prices.
(H/T-NASDAQ)
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