Beef Recall

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3673585&page=1

This is an article on the recent beef recall. The recall includes 21.7 million pounds of meat, "enough to make a McDonald's regular hamburger for every adult in America." The recall started in August, but has been expanded over 600 times to widen the range of affected beef.

This obviously has a huge effect on the economy. Demand has dropped and supply is close to follow.

The main determinent of demand affected would be consumer tastes. Personal tastes are directly changed due to the recall. '"You don't know what's in it," one concerned shopper said. "It makes me feel very scared, and I don't know what to eat."' People will be skeptical of buying beef, even if it is unaffected, due to the danger assiociated with some.

Supply will be greatly affected because the government is investigating several beef farms supplying the sick cows. If these farms are shut down, there will be less suppliers, causing less supply. Government policy will also change supply as huge amounts of beef are being recalled.

Many people are calling for stricter testing and processing due to the recent rise in ecoli outbreaks in various foods. The USDA has no explanation for the recent rise but they better figure something out soon cause I'm not a big fan of soy burgers.

GDP data

So i was on this website... http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm#gdp... and it had the data for the Current-Dollar and "Real" Gross Domestic Product from the year 1929 on. http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls is the excel document in which the data is contained. I thought i was really interesting that the only time we didnt have a rise in GDP was during the great depression. Even with the quarterly estimates of this year the numbers rose. ANother thing i thought was really interesting was the fact that in 1929 the GDP was at
103.6, which was really high compared to the following years of the great depression. Accoring to the data, the united states didnt recover from the crash until 1940 where the GDP was almost where it was in 1929 at 101.4. Another fact that I found interesting is that the data shows both
GDP in billions of current dollars and GDP in billions of chained 2000 dollars, which gives vastly different data for each year. My question to the reader is this... they show the data as such because the value of the has changed over time.... people get paid more and they also pay more for things as Naked Economics points out, but yet what we get paid has increased proportionally faster than the prices... does this show a large amount of "deflation" over time... and if so... what do you think is the cause?? just wondering your thoughts