Or are they? As I sit here and assess for a minute, there is a small possibility that I haven’t changed much over the last 30 years. I am currently nursing injuries from two-wheeled adventures the previous two weekends and I watch the Tour de France at night. I guess I own several kinds of bikes and ride each of them on a regular basis. And I have a half dozen “kits”–which are the tight fitting clothing that minimize drag at speed (and provide zero protection when you crash at those speeds). Plus all the special shoes. I have ridden with two different high school teams for multiple seasons over the last seven years. My wife and our kids all have bikes. We take biking trips. We have multiple bike racks in our garage, there are helmets and other paraphernalia in every bank of garage cabinets and an entire cabinet dedicated to water bottles in the kitchen. Hmm.
So maybe I was wrong. Perhaps I am overly passionate about biking.
Speaking of being wrong…The cyclists above are attacking the descent that the Consumer Price Index has taken over the last year. The price inflation for the things that you and I buy everyday, like bikes, has been reduced from 9.05% last summer to 3.0% this week. These sort of overhauls are not brought to fruition overnight. The calming of runaway costs has been achieved by a methodical raising of interest rates over the same time by the Fed. The orchestration of an uphill economic climb has been quite the workout, but has produced the desired result of slowing the breakneck pace of expenditures. The FOMC paused in June, yet have made it clear that they want to further raise rates another 0.25% the last week of this month. The tried-for trajectory is clearly in motion, and I believe it prudent to allow our free market to run its course. Let’s let it ride, as it were, without another rate hike. Take it from me, Jerome, speed kills. Or at the very least, it causes crashes that result in many, many scars.
