President Bush and his cronies have tried to dupe the American people into believing that deficits no longer matter, that massive government borrowing doesn't lead to inflation. As Reuters' Anupama Chandrasekaran reports, that's simply not true.

Stocks could show some weakness next week as earnings season winds down, while inflation and interest-rate worries stoke investors' concerns about future profits.

Oil prices around $48 a barrel could also keep up the pressure on the markets, strategists said.

[...]

On Friday, Wall Street got a warning shot from a bigger-than-expected jump in U.S. producer prices, excluding food and energy. The core Producer Price Index shot up 0.8 percent in January, the government reported.

That increase -- the biggest gain since December 1998 and well above the Street's expectation for a 0.2 percent rise -- fanned inflation fears and bolstered a growing expectation that the Federal Reserve will keep raising interest rates well into 2005.

If America becomes stuck in the vicious cycle of high inflation and relatively high unemployment (at least compared with the Clinton years), there will only be one man to blame: George Walker Bush.