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

US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 412 posts

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#251

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #13

Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…

> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win.

Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums).

So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#252

Post by 9rx »

lukas099 wrote: post #185
abtinf wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All spending everywhere is essentially “salaries and compensation”. It’s not like you get to the end of the supply chain and suddenly are paying God. Money always goes to people.

I don't agree. If I dig a hole in my yard and find a huge chunk of gold, when I sell it very little of what I charge will be for my labor. Also, even if you're right, the "salaries and compensation" of anyone outside the U.S. are effectively NOT that, since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.

> when I sell it very little of what I charge will be for my labor.

That's debatable. Without the labor input the product doesn't exist as far as the market knows. However, if you want to discount the labor portion, which is an equally valid take, it remains that what was said was “salaries and compensation”. Any compensation you receive for giving up the gold in your possession was already recognized. As said earlier, the exchanged value doesn't go to God, it goes to people.

> since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.

You can certainly play a game of semantics here, but generally "job" in this type of context refers to any kind of economic role, not necessarily direct labor. "It is my job to provide gold to the world" doesn't imply that you are the one doing the actual extraction. The significance of "job programs" is in offering opportunity to derive an income, not to give opportunity to strain muscles.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#253

Post by keybored »

infecto wrote: post #160
4fterd4rk wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't say that. Your reading comprehension is poor.

Perhaps English is not your native language. It at best comes across that many of the 900 are surrounding China and at worst that the 900 is referring to China.

> > Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China.

“Many” could be dozens or hundreds or over half. It’s poorly phrased to the point of being meaningless.

> > I think our total number is close to 900.

Total in the world.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#254

Post by mulmen »

GreedClarifies wrote: post #198
mark_l_watson wrote: post #13

Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…

Fred has the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0 I’m driving, it’s difficult to put them on the same chart and normalize. But they are very similar. There are differences in methodology (housing, healthcare) but those generally add a small amount to US inflation chained index vs HICP.

Put your phone it down before you kill someone. You’re taking an indefensible risk.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#255

Post by esafak »

deeg wrote: post #226
mendelmaleh wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2022 I scraped the current prices for things I bought on amazon the year before, and got a 7% increase. Unfortunately amazon stopped providing order reports recently... ``` $ inflation -y 2021 -f items.csv 86 successful items, 30 failed items 2256.76 total 2021 2427.62 total now +170.86 (+7%) difference ```

That's a pretty neat idea. Do the price aggregation sites (eg. camelcamecamel) do anything like that?

Providing financial reports could be a great sideline for them. Are you listening, Camel?!

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#256

Post by Workaccount2 »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #199
Workaccount2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because business is not a single monolith, and because it is greedy, it kills the naive idea that "businesses raise prices because they can". Any gouging price increase is a gaping hole for a competitor (businesses are greedy and therefore will take money from other businesses) to come in and steal business. This is something that is obvious to people who have been on the business side and mostly opaque to people who…

I'll hold my breath for the fast food chain that lowers its prices to better compete with the chains that raised theirs. We have plenty of examples, with documentation and receipts, of businesses participating in price fixing, collusion, and other cooperative behaviors that result in higher prices for consumers and reduced competition between businesses. You are naively assuming that all businesses express greed in t…

>We have plenty of examples

The issue isn't that we have plenty of examples (which is actually a handful, people always go to the same 2 or 3 cases, but I digress), it's that we have orders of magnitude more counter-examples that are ignored.

It's important to not build your world view on headlines, because headlines are headlines because they are outliers. It's not news when companies competitively adjust prices, it happens thousands of times a day all over the economy. If there was an "undercut on price" button in business meetings, you wouldn't even be able to read the text on it it would be so worn out.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#257

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #55
9rx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own…

Exactly. Don't know about all of Europe, but I find the way inflation is calculated in the countries i lived here as bad faith since it intentionally omits housing costs. So just like a commenter below said, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. Everyone unanimously agreed the numbers are g…

Yes. I'm from Spain, and here housing rental costs are included in inflation... but they're a 4% of the index. Which is laughable, as most people are spending more like 30%-50% of their income on rent.

The rationale is that most people (read: people over 50 or 60) live in houses they own, those spend 0 on rental, so if you calculate the average expenditure on rental, it's low. And buying houses counts as an "investment" so it's not included.

So basically what you say: totally gamed.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#259

Post by tomrod »

diego_moita wrote: post #161
BartjeD wrote: post #10

And this is after they massaged the numbers, to avoid getting fired?

In the end, it won't matter. Only economists, policy makers, investors and people blabbing on the internet do care about stats. Ordinary people just look at price tags; that's all they need.

I fall into all four categories, which identity am I allowed to require that we not kill our economy with inflation?

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#260

Post by tootie »

Supermancho wrote: post #244
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basket of goods that they base the inflation rate on is created by surveying people and asking what they spent their money on. It's intended to reflect how households actually spend money. Not sure how that would be called "cherry picking". How do you think they should do it?

> The basket of goods that they base the inflation rate on is created by surveying people and asking what they spent their money on. What mechanism was that done through? The census or Walmart data? I don't think anyone has seen a staffed table outside a retail store labeled "CPI Survey". This feels like an important question.

The methodology and data is all publicly available. Just go to bls.gov.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/

Every time I've seen someone talk about "real" inflation or unemployment they're just applying a different view on the same BLS data. Metrics like CPI or PPI are derived via a formula to create an indicator. A benchmark that should be apples to apples over a period of time. It's not meant to be comprehensive. But the comprehensive data is all there too.

Post reply on HN