How Ben Bernanke Sentenced The Poorest 20% Of The Population To A Cold, Hungry Winter

he following chart prepared recently by JPMorgan demonstrates something rather scary, and makes it all too clear how the Chairman's plan to "assist" the US population via some imaginary "wealth effect" due to QE2, is about to backfire. As is now becoming all too clear, the prices of energy and food products are about to surge, and in many cases have already done so, but courtesy of some clever gimmicks (Wal Mart selling what was formerly 39 oz of coffee as a 33.9 oz product for example) the end consumers haven't quite felt it yet. They will soon. There is a limit to how much every commodity can open limit up before it appears on the SKU price at one's local grocer. And while a marginally declining "core CPI" is irrelevant for this exercise as it measures only items that are completely outside of the scope of everyday life, what will be far more important to end consumers will be the push higher in food and energy costs. The problem, however, is that for the lowest 20% of Americans, as per the BLS, food and energy purchases represent over 50% of their after-tax income (a number which drops to 10% for the wealthiest twenty percentile). In other words should rampant liquidity end up pushing food and energy prices to double (something that is a distinct possibility currently), Ben Bernanke may have very well sentenced about 60 million Americans to a hungry and very cold winter, let alone having any resources to buy trinkets with the imaginary wealth effect which for over 80% of the US population will never come.