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These graphs by GOOD magazine show how much the dollar has sunk against various currencies from May 07-April 08. But don't feel too bad, folks, at least we're giving the South African Rand a thorough drubbing.
Currency: The Sinking Dollar [GOOD]
The NYT has a cool graphic up that shows all the parts of the Consumer Price Index and uses a color scheme to show how much they've gone up by in the past year. Go to the version on their site so you can zoom in closer on all the cells. It looks like a horribly growing fungus inside a petri dish, which I guess is not far from the truth.
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With consumers pounded by dissapearing jobs, and rising gas and food prices, food stamp use is projected to reach record levels in 2008 and 2009. [NYT]
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Our brain nearly broke looking at this graph the New York Times published this weekend called How Americans Spend Their Money (click to enlarge). By the looks of it, poor people spend twice as much as they earn in taxable income. Rich people outspend the middle fifth on financial stuff by a factor of ~20:1. What the middle fifth and the lowest fifth spend on goods and services is closer than what the middle fifth and the highest fifth spend. The lowest fifth financial flows are very much in the negative. And that's about all the staring at a crazy graph we can do for the moment. What other trends can you see?
You Are What You Spend [NYT]
Credit Slips' Adam Levitin takes a look into the possibly even grimmer future of the housing market. We'll let him explain it because he's smart:...this graph from Credit Suisse is the most sobering thing I've seen in a while. Mortgage_rate_resets It shows that most of the interest rate resets ahead aren't subprime, but are instead Alt-A and option-ARMs...More »
As long as they're still plugged in, most appliances are still sucking energy out of the wall, and dollars out your wallet. GOOD magazine made another one of their pretty graphs, this time featuring a large vampire, to show how much energy and money devices continue to leech. Some people, to combat this vampiric gadget effect, have most of their devices hooked up on powerstrips so they can fully cut power to all non-essential items with just a flick of a few switches.
Vampire Energy [GOOD Magazine]
Blogging Away Debt made this graph to show how much their family reduced energy consumption by installing compact fluorescent light bulbs and unplugging a freezer in the basement. The chart shows a decrease of around 2-3 average kilowatts hours per day, resulting in electrical bills that were about a half as much as before.
A Few Changes Made a Big Difference in Our Electric Bill [Blogging Away Debt]
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11:23 AM on Wed Mar 28 2007
By Ben Popken
1,589 views,
21 comments
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