281–290 of 566 posts
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How did student loan cancellation reverse inflation reduction when it's on hold due to legal challenges? No one has received a penny.
Wealth and income expectations play into current savings. I expect my savings to go up by $20k thanks to this, so I will shift some of my current savings to spending.
You rate the risk of SCOTUS rejecting the program at 0%?
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Why is this downvoted ?
Because it’s antisocial behavior? Reflexively casting doubt (without a counter-argument) on a number that the BLS has been publishing for decades using a transparent methodology isn’t helpful. This number isn’t the “how much am I spending on groceries” number, it’s a much larger snapshot of the price levels across multiple industries. Nobody thinks it’s perfect, but it’s consistent . You might not believe it, but Wal…
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> on the BLS website This is begging the question though. If the problem is BLS, then using BLS as a reference that BLS isn't the problem is blatantly fallacious. The claim is that BLS is deceiving us... so it doesn't make any sense to use them to adjudicate whether they're deceiving us or not. You see the problem right?
No. Because the BLS publishes their methodology, back tests it, and compares it to other weights and methodologies (which they publish full datasets for). You can then compare it to other independent measurements like the MIT Billion Prices Project and see that over an 8-year period, the BLS measurements differ from public pricing info by less than 1% which is less than 1/10th of a percent per year. http://www.thebil…
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?
Inflation linked government bonds from developed countries and your local currency or USD/EUR denomination, depending on your country you may get some tax advantages if you buy local ones. But you should probably have done this long ago, now it may be a bit late.
Oil and copper tends to follow inflation, but they're highly volatile so you can't rotate into them expecting good liquidity. If you hold say $100K+ USD you want to rotate and re-deploy after the carnage with fairly liquid assets at relatively low risk, then I can't think of much beyond take the hit in a conservative cash and select bonds positioned in a capital preservation posture, or Benjamin Graham-style conservative value equities.
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Shadowstats is bullshit for a number of reasons - you can read up on most of them on the official articles and publications and justifications on the BLS website -- which are generally written by statisticians with maths or econ PhDs with no vested political interest, unlike Shadowstats which is written by an MBA who needs to sell a newsletter. But you can very easily debunk Shadowstats by just averaging the ridiculo…
> on the BLS website This is begging the question though. If the problem is BLS, then using BLS as a reference that BLS isn't the problem is blatantly fallacious. The claim is that BLS is deceiving us... so it doesn't make any sense to use them to adjudicate whether they're deceiving us or not. You see the problem right?
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1025266&sid...
In a more pragmatic sense, if you can't be bothered to learn enough economics to evaluate the official number (which is understandable) going with the group that sounds crazy is a bad idea.
This author talks about outside view dismissals being a valid form of evaluating a claim in the context of a cult:
"But the outside view tells you something different. These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult.
Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking.
The outside view doesn't care about content, it sees the form and the context, and it doesn't look good."
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The slope of price v time would be going down if they'd posted 6.9% yoy. The discussion is around how the numbers should be interpreted. There isn't confusion around what they have literally reported.
Nope. You are continually overlaying data with different X axis and trying to draw conclusions and sound authoritative and it’s just sloppy and irresponsible. The instantaneous slope would be negative if the last month happened to observe a slight decrease, true. But the slope of the line between last year and this year would be positive. Both statements can be true: 1. prices just fell slightly since last month 2. p…
>> The instantaneous slope would be negative if the last month happened to observe a slight decrease, true
This is sloppy. It's fine, it's a forum, we aren't writing academic papers.
Nobody is trying to figure the slope of the straight line between the two points, that's what is already reported.
Yes, both can be true.
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It may be - but to the above poster's point - if gas went up 20% in Jan of this year and then stays flat... is it helpful to think of prices as "going up" ? It seems misleading.
If the last time you looked was last year, then yeah. They went up this year. What’s misleading about reporting yearly percentage increases in prices? I’m baffled.
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Store brands have very little advertising costs, for one. Coke spent $4B on advertising in 2021 [0], which is about a quarter of their costs. [1] [0] - https://statstic.com/coca-cola-advertising-costs/ [1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/cost-g...
I guess I must be wrong, but I'll never understand why Coke needs that much advertising. Or anything "that well known". The argument is maybe they are that well known because of advertising, but I just don't think that's the case. Maybe for a crappy product, but not a good product. With Coke it's the quality (and consistency) of the product. I've never tasted anything "as good" as Coke. A new fresh cold can has a bit…
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 I find it hysterical that the 10 year Bond dropped 4% because of this. They think this is the peak, as in the Fed will stop raising interest rates and inflation will only get lower from here. A good time to but the 10 year Bond IMHO.
The whole "expected" thing is sketchy for me. I probably know nothing but why is 7.9% expected, not say 7.5% expected? I think a lot of manipulation of those expectations can be done for "friends in IB".
Anyone making impactful decisions based on expectations should not be making impactful decisions.