That’s hardly certain, but the risk is high enough and immediate enough that you need to confront some serious questions about today’s landscape. For most of us, those questions about inflation boil down to these three:

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Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues have made increasingly clear they’re not inclined to cut interest rates further for fear of aggravating inflation. On the other hand, boosting rates too soon to fend off inflation would hurt an economy already battered by housing, credit and financial woes.

"The Fed is in a box," Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics, said after the latest batch of economic barometers were released Tuesday. That’s why many economists are predicting the Fed will hold rates steady at 2 percent, a four-year low, at the June 24-25 session.

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Yesterday, David Brooks offered up some sobering facts about how far we have come from Benjamin Franklin’s ethic of "hard work, temperance and frugality".  His  NYT Op-Ed piece stems from a recent report on the sorry state of our "financial decadence":  For a  New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture.  Brooks calls this one of the most important economic reports you’ll read this year.

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The report, which inspired a 394-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Friday, was the latest in a run of bad news. Auto sales, the largest retailing sector in the U.S., were off 10.7 percent in May from the year before. And housing? Ugh. Nationwide, according to the Case-Shiller Index, home prices in the first quarter fell 14 percent.

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The letters come against a backdrop of rising concern in the US about the safety of medicines, in no small part because of the ongoing saga about contaminated heparin products. Several countries around the world have recalled heparin products after discovering they contained contaminated heparin sourced from a supplier in China. That event in turn precipitated an administration request for increased funding for the FDA to ensure import safety.

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Those mini-programs, called widgets or applications, enable users to personalize their pages and connect with friends and acquaintances. But they could pose privacy risks. Some security researchers warn that developers of the software have assembled too much information — home town, schools attended, employment history — and can use the data in ways that could harm or annoy users.

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A media report now suggests Apple may adjust its pricing strategy in North America, enabling AT&T to subsidize the 3G iPhone by as much as $200 – and bringing itself a bit closer to that 10-million-units-per-year goal.
 

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