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US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

theguardian.com

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Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#111

Post by mywittyname »

kerng wrote: post #40
boringg wrote: post #27

Hey everyone - we need to chill out for a second. Stop buying the knee jerk reaction of the media trying to freak everyone out and get some good advertising dollars. This is going to take until after the new year maybe Q1-Q3 timeframe to see if it is transitory. Reminder: we had an unprecedented global supply collapse followed by shutdowns and border closures for more than a year combined with historic levels of fast…

You miss the key point on why this is happening and will continue to get significantly worse. What happens when the number of dollars approximately doubles in 2 years as it happened? Do you think prices stay the same and everything is just 50% off? Reality is that the current number is off by reality quite a bit, real number has to be much higher. It's just math and the worst part... it can't be just reversed.

> What happens when the number of dollars approximately doubles in 2 years as it happened?

Do you think countries that don't use the USD will remain unaffected? People keep blaming this on the fed "printing money", but that logic only holds water when just the USA is affected.

Everyone is experiencing inflation; it's a global phenomenon. Some countries have it even worse than the USA because their local production is getting redirected to the USA, where even higher prices will be paid.

In two years, things will very likely cool down globally.

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#112

Post by metamonster »

IMO this was already evident in some goods like vehicles. We are already living in the era of the 100k pickup truck. You can hardly buy anything new that is decent under 40k nowadays.

Unless we see commensurate rises in wages we are in for some real difficulty if this continues.

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#113

Post by srj »

kerng wrote: post #102
boringg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We haven't doubled the money supply (not even close). The amount of misinformation in this conversation in the general public speaks to the lack of understanding of our monetary systems.

So how much has the money supply increased/decreased according to your sources?

You're the one who made the assertion - curious on your sources. If you're simply looking at fiscal stimulus spending that's a pretty naive view of economics.

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#114

Post by u320 »

mywittyname wrote: post #95
u320 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers. Food prices are 30% above where they were in 2010 in the CPI for example.

2010 was the bottom that came after a rather devastating recession. Everything was abnormally cheap in 2010.

That doesn't really change much, it's a rounding error in the calculation. The actual number if you compare to the pre-recession peak is 29.7%.

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#115

Post by honkycat »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #19
argentinian wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible. It's the same strategy that some politicians use in Argentina: they find any kind of thing to blame for inflation, except for monetary policy. Americans, please don't imitate Argentina, keep a healthy economy.

I know that if Red Team had won the election Blue Team would be running news stories every day about the dangers of inflation and how it is hurting the middle class. Instead, we are seeing pundits downplay inflation as either something 'transitory' or something beneficial: "Why the inflation we're seeing now is a good thing" -MSNBC tweet that got deleted. Edit: "Yes, inflation is back, and you should probably be reli…

I mean that is the game right?

They are two heads of the same beast, moving back and forth very rapidly and calling it progress.

Meanwhile popular policies like universal healthcare[0] and marijuana legalization[1] are never addressed. ( To name a few, there are many more ).

And the reason is clear. Tying healthcare to employment keeps people from organizing effectively. If you have a family, and you are on strike, your employer cutting off your healthcare is a brutal move. Also, people get fat off the bureaucracy.

Similar for marijuana legalization. Need to keep the prisons fed with new "forced customers" so the gravy train keeps rolling.

0: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-s... 1:

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#116

Post by somebodythere »

standardUser wrote: post #33

Inflation reduces the value of debt and an era of increased inflation stands to benefit a lot of households. Of course, it helps if wages go up alongside prices, and they have. But even without wage increases, the value of debt lost to inflation is likely worth more than the value of salary lost to inflation for many households.

How does inflation help debt become more serviceable if incomes don't go up to match?

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#117

Post by abeppu »

dubcanada wrote: post #53
kerng wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the key point on why this is happening and will continue to get significantly worse. What happens when the number of dollars approximately doubles in 2 years as it happened? Do you think prices stay the same and everything is just 50% off? Reality is that the current number is off by reality quite a bit, real number has to be much higher. It's just math and the worst part... it can't be just reversed.

I have no idea what you are saying. Also what is "just math" and why can't it be reversed? Inflation can go down, it's not a purely up percentage, you can have negative inflation. What do you mean by "number of dollars approximately doubles in 2"?

You can have negative inflation, but don't central banks work really hard to avoid that because (the theory goes) deflation will kill spending?

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#118

Post by Supermancho »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #59
BitwiseFool wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that if Red Team had won the election Blue Team would be running news stories every day about the dangers of inflation and how it is hurting the middle class. Instead, we are seeing pundits downplay inflation as either something 'transitory' or something beneficial: "Why the inflation we're seeing now is a good thing" -MSNBC tweet that got deleted. Edit: "Yes, inflation is back, and you should probably be reli…

I know HN doesn't like it when you criticize the US left but I'm here with you. I didn't buy a single word out of the Biden administration pre-election. The "never Trump" people were so blinded by Trump that they didn't realize the other guy was a worse bought and paid for puppet than Hilary. Hilary at least had a functioning brain and could reign in the Dems. Biden doesn't even know it's Wednesday.

Biden is used by the D party and allowed a little leeway when he's clear. To be fair, I'm not sure Biden is worse than Trump, who ran amok. It will take decades to recover from the damage done to parts of the country and world (eg lifting the freeze on coal-leases, lift ban on personnel landmines, judge appointments, etc).

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#119

Post by wbsss4412 »

lazide wrote: post #105
wbsss4412 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of ‘if’s’ in the world. In the context of this conversation it was pretty clear that this if was indicating some level of real likelihood. My point was that it just isn’t likely at all. No more than it was before this year anyway.

We’ve got one large ‘once in a century’ shock going on now. Bretton woods was less than a century ago. I don’t know how we would even quantify in any real what odds on any of these events practically speaking. Do you?

This isn’t even the biggest inflation shock in the last 50 years.

A lot of the inflation we are seeing is due to base effects from last year. Oil prices literally went negative at one point and are only back to pre fracking boom levels.

Re: US inflation jumps to 31-year high amid global supply chain crisis

#120

Post by u320 »

simonsarris wrote: post #83
crisdux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link you provided in your previous post is about global prices and uses global commodity data. They are certainly not US-only figures. Correcting this error would likely show you that inflation is real.

That article is about world food prices, every single link I give in my comments contain US-only food prices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114501 I have never said that inflation is not real, only that this price inflation has merely returned prices to 2011-2014 levels (excepting beef, which is actually at a new high).

Prices are always moving so you can say anything you want by cherrypicking individual categories. That says nothing about inflation.
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