541–550 of 605 posts
So housing and food has gone up dramatically, but still "inflation is low" is the story. Doesn't and hasn't passed the smell test in a decade.
"Food Prices are soaring faster than inflation"....Food Prices soaring IS inflation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Australia, some food prizes are up because the farming industry relies on cheap backpacker labor. Borders are shut so no backpackers come in, so a lot of fruit died on the field. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/world/australia/agricultu... It should be noted that the entire industry is notorious for doing every dodgy thing they can get away with, wage theft, rent theft, extreme conditions, so local workers…
I knew backpacking was a thing, but I thought it was quite confidential. I didn't know that the farmers heavily relied on them to harvest
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CPI is absurd, it only perpetuates consumerism and punishes savers. Okay okay back up. The consumer price index is a series of numbers designed to help people understand what dollar-denominated figures mean to ordinary people going about their lives, spending those dollars. If that's "consumerism," well yes, it's a portrait of consumerism. Many economists, mind you, believe CPI doesn't correct quite enough, and sus…
>The consumer price index is a series of numbers designed to help people understand what dollar-denominated figures mean to ordinary people going about their lives, spending those dollars. It's done an absolutely terrible job for the past 15 years, for my lifestyle and where I live. I suspect it hasn't reflect many other people's budgets either, hence the common argument of official CPI figures being nonsense. I don'…
I used to have insurance co-payment, a deduction from my paycheck, and an unreachable out-of-pocket maximum. All of that has changed.
I used to pay about $1200 rent for a crummy house in a dangerous neighborhood. Now, with a paid-off mortgage, I pay just $266 for property tax on a house that is 3109 square feet on 0.39 acres.
Childcare is my wife, so $0 then and now. Income tax remains $0 due to child deductions. Sales tax is about 7%, relatively unchanged.
Education is a new expense compared to 15 years ago when nobody was in school. If I look back more than 20 years instead, to when I was in college, I can see that college has gotten cheaper. Tuition is a tiny bit lower, but the big change is that tuition and books for the first couple years are now free if you get it done in high school. That cuts the price in half.
This is not to say that I pay less. I now have a huge family. Things are cheaper, but I'm buying much more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they're forcing me how to spend my money. What if I don't want to engage in interest (practically all companies deal with interest in one form or another), so when I buy their stocks I'm dealing with interest in some form.
Do you really expect the entire country to change its monetary policy in order to accommodate the peculiar way in which you conduct your finances? That doesn't seem very reasonable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like an implicit premise in that line of reasoning is that consumers have a choice: they can increase their spending if they want a quality upgrade, or they can forgo the upgrade and keep their spending relatively constant. In some cases, though, there often isn't much of a choice. I can't buy a (new-ish) car without a rear-view camera, now that they're mandated. I can't hire a builder and tell him that I do…
Well, except that you do have that choice in most things. You can buy a used car without a rear-view camera, or keep your older car - and many people do. If you want a cheap smartphone, you can get one - I recently had a Nokia 1 (cost me 24 euros!) as an experiment, and it worked fine. If you're content with a TV from 2001, you can get one for free off Craigslist. The reason I like the car as an example is because it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fiat money is the outcome of unfettered capitalism. The government needs money to pay its loans that it took with interest, so what does it do? Detach the currency from anything tangible like gold or other precious metals, then print more money as it desires, devaluing the hard work of people who are trying to save money. There's a reason that interest and usury are prohibited in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Mar…
As population grows and goods get cheaper, it can work the other way too. That can make money more scarce and more valuable. Economics is complicated. Pointing to one lever and saying "I understand the whole machine" is lazy. I call it 'playing dot to dot'. If you just draw lines between any dots you please, you can make the picture look like anything you want. But there is a real picture there, it has lots of dots,…
I'm not claiming to understand the whole machine, however, we know for certain there are rotten practices that make the machine unstable and also much more difficult to understand. Interest and usury are at the core, along with other things that are prohibited by Islam (e.g. selling things that you don't own and several more).
Once those are removed, the system will become much more stable, fair, and better off for everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No joke, back in 2011, a Fed executive insisted that iPad deflation was canceling out higher food prices. Not even that iPads were getting cheaper, just, new ones had faster CPUs, so their effective price was lower. (Which somehow frees up more money for food?) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUST...
The official was correct, from the perspective of economy-wide price stability. The problem wasn't inflation, the problem was expensive food. Obviously, this particular exchange was of no comfort to those who suffer from high food prices, but why should monetary policy be the remedy for high food prices (to the exclusion of its current goals) instead of looking for remedies in fiscal policy, trade policy, regulatory…
So pick whatever definition of inflation you want. Just understand that what normal people care about in terms of inflation is how many pieces of paper they need to achieve the basic goals of their life and your definition is totally irrelevant to their set of concerns. Your having a totally separate conversation then they are with nothing but some semantic overlap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to be prudent, hold land, stocks, or bonds. Buy-and-forget with stocks, on average, outperforms both inflation, and actively managed portfolios.
until you need the money to pay big emergency bills, which at he wrong time can wipe you out no wonder there are half a million bankruptcies per year because of medical bills in the US and 40% of people have no savin and another significant portion doesn't have enough saving to spend time to invest in stocks, bonds and land(land also comes with perpetual high property taxes in most places in the US)
For the other overwhelming majority of life events, you should invest your savings prudently, instead of stuffing them into a mattress.
If you have no savings, this is a moot point - but so is inflation. Why do you care that money is losing value if you don't have any?
If anything, if you are in debt, you want inflation - because it lets you inflate your debt away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Its probably being cancelled out in the basket by healthcare and education prices skyrocketing. Oh wait. If you go to bls's site, you can easily tell what it's being canceled out by. From the looks of it, it's mostly being canceled out by low energy prices. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/supplemental-files/home.htm
I live near San Fran and I paid over $4/gallon for regular gas. That’s the same price I paid when gas was at all time highs. I know that a lot of it is taxes but the BLS must be taking that into consideration, no? Also electricity is at all time highs, depending on the tier and time of day I’m paying 0.50/kWh. During the pandemic this has been killing me. I can’t believe that energy prices are low at least around her…