Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

bls.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 566 posts

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#141

Post by boole1854 »

hnburnsy wrote: post #94

Anyone notice that brand name soda (looking at you Coke) has increased almost 100% while the generic/house brand has had slight increases. I feel like Coke is testing the pricing limits of its customers especially with the smaller packaging and these prices will not come back down.

If you check Coke's financial statements, you'll see that although revenue has risen quickly, cost of revenue has risen about as fast, leading to relatively unchanged gross profit margins (36% so far in 2022, compared with 40%+ in every year from 1985-2014 and between 33%-39% from 2015 to 2021). Word from industry press is that the rising price of aluminum has been a major driver of the increased costs.

I don't know why pricing for the generic brands wouldn't increase as much. Perhaps some stores see the large price increase in branded soft drinks as an opportunity to get people to shift to the store brands and are willing to tolerate lower profit margins to see if that strategy pays off.

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#142

Post by fullstop »

keewee7 wrote: post #14

It's a bit higher in Denmark and I have a little too much stored as fiat in the bank. What is a safe asset to store value while inflation is >10% in a developed country?

Thankfully you're no longer earning negative interest on your bank account.

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#143

Post by soared »

koolba wrote: post #96
ceejayoz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did student loan cancellation reverse inflation reduction when it's on hold due to legal challenges? No one has received a penny.

> No one has received a penny. The Biden administration mailed student loan checks to people (conveniently set up to arrive just before the most recent midterm): https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/student-loan-re... The checks are "rebates" for people who paid their student loans during the moratorium. The idea is to reimburse those people and add back their student loan debt so they can claim the maximum $…

No checks were delivered because it’s still going through the courts though, so this likely hasn’t had much of an effect yet.

Additionally it’s only for people who paid their loans during the pandemic and have less than $10k in their current loan balance. The check is for whatever amount would return their balance back to $10k.

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#144

Post by arcbyte »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #16

RANT: This inflation and coming recession is entirely on the hands of the current leadership in the Fed and Treasury. Their super-low interest rates over the years are coming full circle. We live in a centrally planned economy. My advice to the Fed is to set the Fed Funds Rate to equal inflation! This will stop the wild swings in the economy and keep inflation in check. When the Fed Funds Rate is lower than inflation…

Yup they should have been raising rates ~2013. US government should also have been starting to pay down debt in that time frame too. It's like blind men are at the wheel of the economy.

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#145

Post by elil17 »

tharne wrote: post #75
elil17 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a lie, it's just not so simple that you can stop reading after the headline. This very post includes information about category-by-category inflation. Inflation for food has been about 10% YOY. Dairy is 15% and fresh milk is 14.5% (13.2% for whole milk and 15.4% for 0, 1, and 2% milk).

The numbers are a lie, or at the very least, vastly understate the impact. For example, if I used to buy grass-fed beef, but am now buying the grade D crap because prices are so high, that doesn't get captured in the inflation numbers. And there are a whole host of things like that; you'll notice many hotels have scaled back on cleaning frequency but the price of a room hasn't gone done, so you're paying the same for…

The way CPI is calculated is complex, but they do try to account for substitution and quality changes: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/common-misconceptions-abo...

See "When the cost of food rises, does the CPI assume that consumers switch to less desired foods, such as substituting hamburger for steak?" and "Is the use of "hedonic quality adjustment" in the CPI simply a way of lowering the inflation rate?".

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#146

Post by 0x445442 »

matwood wrote: post #80
lunaru wrote: post #31

It bears repeating because this is a common mistake in inflation discussions: a decrease in inflation metrics means price increases are slowing down, it doesn’t mean that prices are going down （that would require a negative CPI print). Also, this number is year over year, so the decrease just means the price increases between Oct 21 and Oct 22 are not as steep as between Sept 21 to Sept 22, which is not hard to achie…

And to add to your explanation, because inflation jumped so quickly and then slowed we'll eventually hit a YoY number that plummets. If milk is $4/gallon today and still $4/gallon 12 mos. from now, that's 0% YoY inflation. This will inevitably lead to people saying the numbers are fake because milk used to be $2/gallon.

Especially when their incomes didn’t double.

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#147

Post by FollowingTheDao »

InTheArena wrote: post #5
danuker wrote: post #2

Finally the mania is slowing down. It seems the rate hikes and layoffs are working.

Probably too strong of a statement. I don't view this as a huge miss (.2%), and ask anyone you know on a fixed income what this is doing to their retirement. Ulitmately, it's the glut of cash out there (IMHO) that is going to need to resolve itself before inflation gets back to a normal level.

I agree. And buy the 10 Year Bond today, its at a great discount!

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#148

Post by alistairSH »

hnburnsy wrote: post #94

Anyone notice that brand name soda (looking at you Coke) has increased almost 100% while the generic/house brand has had slight increases. I feel like Coke is testing the pricing limits of its customers especially with the smaller packaging and these prices will not come back down.

Of course they are. There was a much-watched video that went around a few weeks ago that composed quite a few CEOs talking about pushing the pricing envelope to take advantage of inflation news (effectively saying: "People now expect price increases, we can leverage that to our gain!").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psYyiu9j1VI

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#149

Post by flavius29663 »

Zigurd wrote: post #120

Several commenters have provided various reasons year-over-year numbers are, to put it mildly, difficult to interpret. Another reason is that a major war in Europe started within this year, adding to the difficulty of Y0Y comparisons. The principal weapon deployed against the aggressor is economic warfare to collapse Russia's economy. That has only recently made an impact that can't be denied in Russia. Meanwhile, th…

You can't blame US inflation on the Russia war, this is a DNC misdirection. For the US at least, it should be a minor factor.

The US were trading very little with Russia to begin with, even before the war. Russia's economy before the war was still smaller than California, New York or Texas. Waging economic warfare on a medium economy like that should not wreak the US, Europe or the World economies.

Re: US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected

#150

Post by dsfyu404ed »

giantg2 wrote: post #93
germandiago wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well explained. Idk for english-speaking countries or your country of origin but the average spanish is an absolute illiterate in economy. These explanations are very necessary so that people develop an intuition of what is going on.

Many Americans are illiterate on numbers and the economy too. I still remember the classic example that a burger chain released a 1/3 pound burger to compete with another chain's 1/4 pound burger, and many people thought the 1/4 pound was bigger... Edit: there are some people saying it's a myth, or not a complete picture. Looks like we don't have the data. But my point is that we aren't very good with numbers or econ…

>Many Americans are illiterate on numbers and the economy too

Many more pretend to be less literate than they are for ideological reasons.

>still remember the classic example that a burger chain released a 1/3 pound burger to compete with another chain's 1/4 pound burger, and many people thought the 1/4 pound was bigger.

This trope needs to be taken out back and shot. It wasn't that people didn't get it. It's that it was poorly marketed and the difference between 1/3 and 1/4 isn't enough to make people go to a burger chain that was dying due to low and variable quality when they could just go to McDicks and get a reliable 1/4lb.

Post reply on HN