NYT Reports On Increase in Clothing Prices, Wages Up for Class of 2011, Current Average Price of Gasoline in All 50 States, and China Cutting Holdings of USDs

It's Easter and I have a lot of work to do, so today is a quick post.
New York Times reported on increase in clothing prices Friday:

As retailers have been warning, their costs are rising as cotton and other materials get more expensive, laborers in China demand higher wages and fuel prices go up.

No mention of Bernanke and Fed money printing in the article, big surprise.  Mark J. Perry has a graph and post on rising wages of new college graduates:

2. NACE -- "The good news continues to roll in for the Class of 2011 as results from NACE’s Spring 2011 Salary Survey show that the average salary offer to all Class of 2011 graduates now stands at $50,462, which is up 5.9 percent over the overall average of $47,673 to Class of 2010 graduates."

Inflationary expectations?
Here is a great chart on average gas prices in all 50 states from AAA

And now China Central Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan is announcing that he is looking to drop 2/3 of the $3 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves the Central Bank currently has. From Xinhua:

China's foreign exchange reserves increased by 197.4 billion U.S. dollars in the first three months of this year to 3.04 trillion U.S. dollars by the end of March.

Xia Bin, a member of the monetary policy committee of the central bank, said on Tuesday that 1 trillion U.S. dollars would be sufficient. He added that China should invest its foreign exchange reserves more strategically, using them to acquire resources and technology needed for the real economy.

The problem is, where are they going to be invested into?  Who is going to want to buy dollar reserves?


I will end with this idiocy you have probably heard of by now:

In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.

Unbelievable, nothing like the government telling a business where they can set up shop.  Mish nails it:

The National Labor Relations Board is not acting like a group of thugs. Rather, the NLRB instead acting like a group of slave-masters attempting to put balls-and-chains on Boeing.

Even if Boeing benefits greatly from the military industrial complex, this still isn't right.