Earlier quoted context omitted.
However that two years of excess mortality is still less than one year of population growth. How do you answer that
Babies don't work in grocery stores.
Not with that attitude
Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
41–50 of 71 posts
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#42It's really housing that needs the fix and I dont think they have a solution to that one
There is a bill in the works right now to keep mutual funds and similar from just scooping up every house they can for rent, I imagine there are very few actions that could make more of a difference.
Housing costs are driven by local supply issues vastly more than big national buyers. They're just swooping in because the massive undersupply has made them a good asset to own in the past 15 years.
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#43Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#44It's really housing that needs the fix and I dont think they have a solution to that one
There is a bill in the works right now to keep mutual funds and similar from just scooping up every house they can for rent, I imagine there are very few actions that could make more of a difference.
Building more housing. Building a lot more housing would make a much larger difference.
In terms of specific government actions, that's upzoning all residential areas and approving plans by default with chance for challenges if they fit within established (reasonable) requirements.
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#45This soft landing will be viewed as one of the greatest economic achievements in history.
"soft landing" After three years of constant inflation and shrinkflation on the majority of products you buy? - a family size of cookies used to be 17.2oz, its now 14.6oz for the same price - laundry detergent scent enhancer - 13oz to 10oz and increased in price - a pack of frozen burritos went from 20 items to 18 for the same price - baby wipes in a smaller sized package and they increased in price - OJ went from a…
> After three years of constant inflation
It was like a 14 month burst, and it's been over since last summer. Here's the chart: https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
And yes, it includes changes in package size.
I genuinely don't understand the doomslinging impulse on this. It's like people actually want inflation to be worse than it actually was, as if it makes them Right on the Internet or something. But it's wrong. You're wrong.
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#46It's really housing that needs the fix and I dont think they have a solution to that one
There is a bill in the works right now to keep mutual funds and similar from just scooping up every house they can for rent, I imagine there are very few actions that could make more of a difference.
Are the mutual funds immune from supply & demand economics or are they just taking advantage of a shortage that means real estate prices go inexorably up? Maybe we could just increase supply and then the mutual funds won't be so interested in buying up the supply. Although I don't know how that's bad to begin with -- it's not like everyone wants to own their own home.
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s so weird to me that the labor story seems to leave out that 1m people died in the pandemic and also the largest generation in history is retiring.
I was under the assumption that the majority of people dying were at the 50+ age range. So not as many people that were employed.
Outside of software developers (more specifically, software developers in the Bay Area), most people work waaaaay past 50. At least 10 more years, and more than a few are probably going 15-20.
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
And unlike the last eight predicted recessions, this predicted recession might actually happen! On account of it still being in the future.
Yield curve inversions are not excitable attention-seeking pundits, but an emergent measure of the market as a whole. They are also not 100% accurate... but they're fairly accurate. There are also sensible reasons to believe they are indeed causally connected to some reasonable degree, so it's not throwing chicken livers and reading the future either. It's best not to conflate actual measures being tentatively interp…
> It's best not to conflate actual measures being tentatively interpreted on the basis of a century of history with some guy with a camera and a YouTube channel
The commenter upthread "penciled in" a recession for Q3 of next year and cited your favorite metric. I think that's closer to a TikTok hit than a "tentatively interpreted" bit of pop economics.
But to treat with your actual point: it still sounds like bunk to me. I had to dig, but FRED does indeed have a chart for this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y) and sure, if you squint, it looks like it predicts. Except that the time between an inversion and the predicted recession is all over the map. It looks like the 1988 recession took two years (!) to actually arrive, while the 1980 recession jumped the gun. And 2008 seems to refute the theory, because the inversion had corrected itself almost a year before the financial crisis (which pretty clearly had nothing to do with bond rates anyway). Also the magnitude of the inversion doesn't seem to have any correlation with the recession, the inversion swung way lower in the late 70's than it did any other time, but that recession was actually pretty mild. And the inversion of 2006 was barely an inversion at all.
Yeah, this is wrong. No serious economics seem to be pushing this.
We have an inversion right now because the Fed has been swinging its hammer like crazy and the market is responding to the fact that they think rates are going to drop rapidly RSN (which is a higher risk for longer term bonds, obviously). That explanation makes a ton more sense than some handwaving about a "predictive metric".
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#49It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) for the price hikes but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. Meanwhile overall wages don't seem to track inflation. It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because…
> It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again.
I don't really have a strong opinion on the veracity, but I think the guy being interviewed is trying to provide an explanation for why restaurants specifically have 4x more MoM inflation than groceries. I don't think he's making an overall claim about the cause of recent inflation.
As far as the relationship between increased labor costs and low unemployment, lower unemployment gives workers more opportunities to vote with their feet and gives unionized workers more bargaining power.
Re: Food price hikes are no longer outpacing overall inflation
#50It's interesting that the article is quick to blame "increased labor costs" and low unemployment (???) for the price hikes but then doesn't explain why prices for some items actually went down again. Meanwhile overall wages don't seem to track inflation. It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because…
> It reads like some businesses had to increase wages to retain employees but this doesn't seem to be causative as these employees were asking for higher wages because of the increased cost of living, not the other way around.
This is backwards. No business increases wages because employees ask for it. Employees always ask for higher wages. Wages go up when you can't find workers for lower wages.