It's the < . > stupid!

And yet it moves, in the words of Galileo, "Eppur si muove"

Stare at it 'till you're cross-eyed; won't see it happen. Gang team; and keep at it 24/7...nothing. Still, it moves. During these last glorious thirty plus years , it has had a constant rightward valency; will it last? Maybe it's starting to get itchy. Wants a change of direction. Beginning to drift?

Want to test it? See it in action, so to speak. Get a copy of your local daily of say 1970 and todays edition. Look them over. Check the price of a loaf of bread, for example. 1970 about $ .25, right? Now, today, $2.50. What happened? Look at a dozen eggs,1970 $.25 now $2.50. How can it be, you ask excitedly, what's going on.
The house I sold in 1968 for $10000. it's, OMG, $100000, they were giving stuff away in those days! Wait, this old pay stub. The gross pay, one week, $80. I make $800 now. Oh, oh.

Relax, nothing's changed. Well one thing has. It's possible to control a screaming jet, a cruise liner, even a two year old's temper tantrum but one small thing cannot be controlled. You can try as you will, nothing works. Even a parenthesis ( ), for containment, no help, a hat pin through the heart, nah, a splash of white-away only creates an illusion of control.

To maul shamelessly the words of Baroness Orczy in her classic "The Scarlet Pimpernel", 'They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere; is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive decimal point!'

There's your culprit; that sinister imp, that impudent little wretch, that damned spot. No mistake about it. Ignore John Maynard Keynes, the entire Austrian School of Economics, even the dread Chicago Gang, they know not what they are talking through their spread-sheets about. They are missing the point. But every lowly merchant in the third world knows about the point, and has one; sort of a family icon. Keeps it always handy. Currency changes; today up-tomorrow down, out from under the apron comes... the magic decimal point. Nothing changes except the point! Life goes on. All is well. No worry.

That's the third world. With us it's different. All in the control, we say. Got the printing press, no problem. We make the money. That's our freakin' point. And so we nod off, get complacent, forget to keep watching that 'damned elusive' decimal point, who cares, until, whoa! it moved. "Did you see that? Did you?". Nobody saw it for sure, but it moved. Not all that far. Just a nudge...to the right.

There it stays. For ages and ages. Is this the new reality? Will it last forever? Wait, did you see something? Oh, no, unless my eyes are getting crossed again, it leaned a little...to the left. Gad! What next?