Consumer Price Index Seattle

sEATTLE-TACOMA-BREMERTON AREA
CONSUMER PRICE INDEXES: OCTOBER 2008

The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported consumer prices in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton area decreased 0.8 percent for the two months ending October 2008. Regional Commissioner Richard J. Holden said that the decrease in the all items index was mainly due to lower prices for transportation. From October 2007 to October 2008, overall prices rose 3.4 percent and the all items less food and energy index increased 3.0 percent. Local Consumer Price Index (CPI) data are not seasonally adjusted.

The transportation index fell 7.9 percent during the past two months, primarily due to a 21.6 percent drop in gasoline prices. The two-month decrease in gasoline prices was the largest decline since the 1998 CPI revision. Over the year, the transportation index rose 3.0 percent and gasoline prices advanced 4.1 percent.

The housing index increased 0.9 percent for the two months ending October 2008 and was 4.3 percent higher over the year. Shelter, the primary component of housing, also increased 0.9 percent over the past two months and was up 5.3 percent compared to one year ago. Within the shelter category, the rent of primary residence index rose 1.1 percent and the owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence index advanced 1.9 percent from August to October. Over the past year, the rent of primary residence index rose 6.6 percent and the owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence index increased 7.4 percent. Shelter also includes lodging away from home, an unpublished subcategory. Fuels and utilities, another component of housing, increased 0.5 percent during the past two months and was 4.8 percent higher over the past 12 months. Within the fuels and utilities index, prices for electricity declined 1.2 percent over the past two months, while prices for utility (piped) gas services moved up 10.4 percent. Compared to October 2007, prices for electricity increased 0.7 percent and prices for utility (piped) gas service rose 10.8 percent. Prices for household furnishings and operations increased 0.9 percent during the latest two-month period, but were 1.3 percent lower compared to one year ago.

The food and beverages index advanced 2.0 percent from August to October and was 6.0 percent higher over the year. Grocery prices, as measured by the food at home index, moved up 3.1 percent over the past two months and were 8.0 percent higher than a year ago. Food away from home rose 1.0 percent from August to October and advanced 4.5 percent for the latest 12-month period.

Medical care prices decreased 0.2 percent for the two months ending in October, yet were unchanged over the year.

Apparel prices increased 0.2 percent for the latest two-month period, but were 6.4 percent lower over the past year.

Among the remaining major expenditure categories, prices for education and communication rose 2.4 percent, while prices for recreation moved down 1.8 percent for the latest two-month period. Over the past year, education and communication prices advanced 4.5 percent and recreation prices rose 1.9 percent. The other goods and services index advanced 2.1 percent from August to October and rose 1.2 percent over the latest 12-month period.

The All Items, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area measured 225.915 (1982-84=100). This means a market basket of goods and services that cost $100.00 in 1982-84 would have cost $225.92 in October 2008.

Apocalypse Now

We are living in an extraordinary time.

The world has been badly shaken.

In the space of a few days a system that we thought was as secure and assured as the air we breathe lost all its landmarks, its clarity, and was seemingly swallowed up by a black hole.

Money–essential to the spirit of peace–congealed, like blood in veins.

Credit–this fine word is also expressive of people’s faith in others–like a machine that jammed, and then stopped.

Confidence–the famous “confidence” that is also integral to the pact among citizens and the reasons it must be perpetuated–like a spell that is evaporating.

The situation brings to mind the words of Thomas Hobbes, whose attempts to shed light on the enigma of the institutions of society were only taken half-seriously.

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One recalls “Leviathan,” Rousseau’s “Social Contract,” de la Boetie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”: theories that had almost fallen out of view but in fact described what is taking place now in plain view, during a worldwide crisis unprecedented in the history of our various capitalisms.

What is a social bond and how is it broken? Voila. Here we are. This debacle, this shipwreck, is showing us the answer.

What is political time and how does it get away from us? Take the four days wasted by American legislators before they committed to voting for the Paulson plan; take those four short days that we know really counted doubly, triply, perhaps even more, wreaking irreparable damage. That is the type of procrastination that prevails in situations that qualify as “pre-revolutionary.”

Is man a predator of man? Does the fear of this predator slumber within us? An anxiety, formerly concealed by a poorly applied varnish of civilization, about a state of nature that is re-emerging? Consider the princes of finance, once so polite, so complicit, so civilized, who have been facing each other at the edge of the abyss, waiting to see who will be the next to fall; consider that dance of wolves, the ferocious ballet of battered predators sniffing at each other, detecting the scent of death on their neighbors, coveting their remains; consider the tango of white-hot hate that has been discreetly called the “drying up of interbank credit.”

The scent of execution and of collective suicide has been circulating in the middle of the pack.

It is as though we have been watching a deadly dance around a fire, where those same people who, through their irresponsibility, devastating egoism and, it must be said, intelligence, turned mad and led the financial world toward implosion, thinking that they could pull themselves out of the furnace by pushing the others in first.

And the result has been, for all of us, a suspended apocalypse, in which it is easy to lay out the implacable chain of consequences, but also a situation in which no one knows how to defuse the mechanism. How to respond if account holders attempt to withdraw cash that the banks no longer have? How should we react if electrical and gas utilities default on payment to their employees? What will happen when an angry mob of ruined savers, mainstream borrowers harassed by those who pressured them to go into debt in the first place, and the desperate and unemployed erupt in protest and–according to a scenario that we in France know too well–shout their rage beneath the windows of the speculators, loan sharks and others with golden parachutes?

At that time, those who are responsible will have two options.

They are all afflicted with an ignorance of the dark, unknown world bristling with new threats that they enter with us.

They are all feeling their way, stumbling along. Many leaders have had a terrible time avoiding here a gaffe, a rhetorical stumble there, at quelling the nearly imperceptible bodily ticks that betray one’s vertigo.

Nonetheless, there are distinctions among them.

There are always leaders who–as historian Raymond Aron said of a defeated former French president–ignore the fact that “History is tragic,” who believe that everything always works out. After such a long time, they think, isn’t History used to playing out its confrontations without hurting anyone? Is it not dedicated to convulsions that are not and will never be more than innocent pirouettes?

Conversely, there are those who are sensitive to Tragedy, who know that nothing is more fragile, precarious and quick to disintegrate than a well-established social bond–as French poet Paul Valery wrote, “All that holds it together is magic.” You start off with a financial crisis, then the whole cloth begins to unravel little by little: At the beginning you have a terrified crowd, and at the end, a lynch mob.

In the second category, we find French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In the second category, we sometimes find leaders who–like him–are concentrated, determined, inhabited by circumstance at the same time they grapple with it: In their gaze, we see a little of the lucid terror that defines all great statesmen.

<!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> Bernard-Henri Levy’s new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism, was published in September by Random House. This piece was translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.

Epic Failure

As investors all around the world ran scared this past month, their panic was about the only thing easy to understand. The global financial system was collapsing and almost nobody could say–in plain English–what exactly was fueling such a gigantic crisis. Not the president, who offered insipid generalities; nor the presidential candidates, who stuck to old themes like earmarks, taxes, and deregulation. Not even Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who delivered abstract lessons about liquidity and interest-rate spreads but whose plan for the government to buy “toxic assets”–loans that have little or no market value because of their lack of transparency–misfired and had to be recast as a plan to buy stakes in banks. This has been the Great Incomprehensible Recession of 2008. Incomprehensibility was at the root of the problem, and it is at the root of our difficulty getting out of it. As the United States struggles to get past the turmoil, the challenge will be to understand its most basic causes. Did the trouble start with the Reagan agenda of deregulation? The Bush era’s passive Securities and Exchange Commission and Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve, with their loose rules governing off-the-books investments and the ratio of capital to lending by financial institutions? The flood of capital into the United States from China and the Persian Gulf? The Federal Reserve’s easy money and the failure to regulate complex new derivatives? Or was it the liberal political pressure on Congress and the administration to keep interest rates low and expand homeownership recklessly through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The truth probably includes some role for all these explanations. But the truth has also been radically unclear because of the difficulty in understanding the machinations and statements of the financial wizards handling our money. <A TARGET=”_blank” HREF=”http://ad.ca.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/3769/3/0/%2a/s%3B206327071%3B1-0%3B0%3B21059311%3B237-250/250%3B27621725/27639604/1%3B%3B%7Eaopt%3D2/2/19/0%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttps://www.tnr.com/members/subscribe.aspx”><IMG SRC=”http://m1.2mdn.net/1559547/tnr_electionspass2_300×250.jpg” alt=”" BORDER=0></A> <a target=”_blank” href=”http://ad.ca.doubleclick.net/N3081/jump/tnr.ca/politics/story;loc=bigbox;sz=250×250;ptile=2;kw=ron;kw=politics;kw=tnr;ord=42977399?”> <IMG align=”TOP” border=”0″ vspace=”0″ hspace=”0″ src=”http://ad.ca.doubleclick.net/N3081/ad/tnr.ca/politics/story;loc=bigbox;sz=250×250;ptile=2;kw=ron;kw=politics;kw=tnr;ord=42977399?”> </a> Throughout its recent heyday, Wall Street sounded so smart. They developed computer models and complicated packages of assets that seemed to make the risky debt piled on homeowners and consumers look like safe debt. The sheer complexity of these assets masked the weakness in the system. The jargon employed to describe off-the-books “structured investment vehicles,” “collateralized debt obligations,” and computerized financial models–not to mention the exotic derivatives like “credit default swaps”–was a barrier to understanding how they worked. As Representative Barney Frank says, it has not been easy for even the most sophisticated investment banker to explain the workings of credit default, currency, or interest-rate swaps. Swaps–essentially contracts between two or more parties aimed at hedging against the loss on an underlying asset–are the instruments that Warren Buffett famously once described as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” The danger is aggravated by the difficulty in measuring what threat they posed for the institutions–commercial banks, investment banks, mutual funds, pensions, hedge funds, insurance companies–possessing them. There are now more than $500 trillion of such swaps and options notionally coursing through the global financial system, and, while we know that doesn’t translate into $500 trillion in risk, no one is sure in the current environment what the actual risk is. Not since the height of the cold war has the fate of the world rested so profoundly in the hands of a priesthood of experts with a monopoly of understanding obscure concepts, if they understand them at all. The expertise of the cold warriors was in throw weights, MIRVS, and the concept of “mutual assured destruction,” which was supposed to make us secure. It is not a terribly comforting analogy. | PAGE 1 2 3 | NEXT PAGE