100 Free Continental Airlines Miles For Cardholders
Jan 6th
Registration is required. Bonus miles will be deposited into the primary Cardmember’s OnePass® account within 4-6 weeks after the end of the promotion. Offer valid for existing Continental Airlines/Chase Credit and Debit Cardmembers.
One card they are promoting is the Continental Airlines OnePass Plus Card, which has improved their sign-up incentive to include a $50 statement credit, 30,000 free miles, and a pretty nice mix of perks for travelers including free checked bags for you and companions.
It’s actually a good time to apply for this card because Continental and United are merging in 2011, and the resulting airline will be called United. Since these Chase-affiliated cards usually only allow one sign-up bonus per lifetime, you might as well apply for the Continental now because it won’t be around anymore after a few more months.
MIT’s Real-time Inflation Calculator
Dec 20th
Professors Roberto Rigobon and Alberto Cavallo at the MIT Sloan School of Management started the Billion Prices Project which, directly pulls data from online retailers from around the world. In the US, the software is tracking 550,000 items from 53 retailers. The best part – since it’s all automated, the numbers are updated daily! The goal is to predict the CPI before they even announce it. You can see from the charts below that the two track reasonably well together.
Daily BPP Index vs. CPI
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Annual Inflation (over last 365 days)
If they start to vary widely, which one should be considered inaccurate? Via the NY Times.
Wikileaks Ben Bernake & quantitative easing
Dec 10th
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last year:
PELLEY You’ve been printing money?
BERNANKE Well, effectively. And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. when the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation.
Bernanke on “60 Minutes” this year:
BERNANKE One myth that’s out there is that what we’re doing is printing money. We’re not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we’re doing is lowing interest rates by buying Treasury securities. And by lowering interest rates, we hope to stimulate the economy to grow faster. So, the trick is to find the appropriate moment when to begin to unwind this policy. And that’s what we’re gonna do.
And the Fed is buying Treasury securities how? By printing money.
Hey, maybe it’ll turn out to be a good idea, but at least tell us the truth. Increasing the money supply is as you said Ben, “effectively” printing money.
