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US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

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Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#341

Post by anigbrowl »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #237
abtinf wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold. The purchasing power of Gold has been remarkably consistent over the long term. That is, if you convert the gold to dollars, how many eggs could you buy? To learn more, read up on the work of Keith Weiner of Monetary Metals, or listen to the early episodes of his podcast “The Gold Exchange”.

The problem with gold is that it's price fluctuates just like any other commodity. The practical uses of gold accounts for only ~8% of gold mined, while half is for vanity (jewelry, a luxury product) and the rest for speculation and reserves. Similar to fiat, most of the value in gold is in people believing it has value.

This misses the point that you can establish the purchasing power of gold very easily vs a basket of common groceries or consumer goods.

vanity (jewelry, a luxury product)

Jewelry traditionally functioned as a rough store of value because it's easy to sell quickly (albeit at a steep discount), and it makes a remarkably reliable Veblen good, as a glance at the Oval Office will demonstrate.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#342

Post by troyvit »

projectazorian wrote: post #335
yalogin wrote: post #25

Oh no someone is getting fired again. This poor soul forgot that telling the truth is forbidden

The problem the admin has is that economists at the BLS by and large aren't scared of getting fired. That work experience is gold in the private sector - most of them can easily get a job in finance and 3x-4x their comp.

I'm not being sarcastic when I say it probably looks great on an economist's resume to say they were fired by the Trump admin.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#344

Post by mhh__ »

qzw wrote: post #317
mhh__ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we only get to hear if inflation is "Aladeen" or "Aladeen"

Employment aladeen, inflation aladeen. Chances of stagflation looking very aladeen indeed.

It makes our macro forecasting a bit less dimensional...

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#345

Post by judahmeek »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #285
Havoc wrote: post #36

Are there inflation indicators that aren’t government controlled? Don’t think anything coming out of trump influenced bodies is worth the paper it’s on anymore

What you really need to understand about inflation, is that we've had particularly exceptionally low long-term inflation in America for the last 50 years, outside of stagflation in the '70s. And this is all enabled by globalization and global trade. Globalization fundamentally provides arbitrage for two things. Labor costs, and environmental regulation. Because there were a lot of poor desperate countries that would…

> But essentially what Trump is doing is in line with everything I've described.

No. Trump's tariffs are too unfocused to accomplish any goal besides increasing American inflation from what I've read.

Trump's tariffs on raw materials, metals, etc make no sense whatsoever.

Motivating the creation of new mines or refining facilities should have been done through subsidies, possibly combined with promise of future tariffs.

And, obviously, Trump's tariffs on raw materials raise the cost of construction & composite products, which will likely push manufacturing out of the U.S.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#346

Post by AtlasBarfed »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #294
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are voting for chaos, because the establishment in the Republican and Democratic parties simply do not care about the everyday people. As an environmentalist, I essentially have no party, and so while I hate Donald Trump, I understand exactly why he was voted into office.

One is selling off our national parks/forests, removing protections for marine sanctuaries, but you essentially have no party?

The Democrats have functionally done nothing about global warming in the last thirty years except released even more CO2 in hot air paying lip service

Yes, one is worse than the other. But in terms of real environmental policy, they are functionally the same.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#347

Post by amy_petrik »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #285
Havoc wrote: post #36

Are there inflation indicators that aren’t government controlled? Don’t think anything coming out of trump influenced bodies is worth the paper it’s on anymore

What you really need to understand about inflation, is that we've had particularly exceptionally low long-term inflation in America for the last 50 years, outside of stagflation in the '70s. And this is all enabled by globalization and global trade. Globalization fundamentally provides arbitrage for two things. Labor costs, and environmental regulation. Because there were a lot of poor desperate countries that would…

>Globalization is fundamentally enabled by the US Navy and US military supremacy guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans.

>This has not been the historical Norm. It's actually historical anomaly caused by the power vacuum of world war II, and secondarily by the fact that the Cold war was between the US and maritime power and Russia, who are effectively landlocked.

>This combined with American lack of enthusiasm for maintaining this global order, likely means that globalization will come to an end.

Oh here friend, I think you forget to add a citation to all that, here's your citation so people know where the idea come from (not you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zeihan

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#348

Post by matheweis »

Analemma_ wrote: post #311
tim333 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked perplexity and there are a few independent calculations (ShadowStats, Truflation, Billion Prices) that put the rate at about 10% https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-us-inflation-ra...

If you actually stop and think about it for a couple seconds, you should realize immediately that a “secret” inflation rate of 10% is impossible. You can lie about that for a month or two, but 10% annual inflation means prices double every 7 years, which is obviously not what we observe.

> prices double every 7 years, which is obviously not what we observe.

It’s not? The first two things that came to mind to check are almost exactly doubled:

Case-Schiller for Seattle metro area for example is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEXRNSA/

Price of eggs is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#349

Post by aurareturn »

ivape wrote: post #330
deeg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tariffs raise the price in tangential ways. Tariffs on Chinese steel means US chicken wire producers switch to more expensive US sources. Increased demand for US sources make it even more expensive. Farmers buy the more expensive chicken wire, passing the added expense to McDonalds, which passes it on to you.

The chicken nuggets were edging past $5 dollars before the tariffs, during the Biden era. Mcdonalds owns Chipotle so they are well aware of premium pricing for regular food. They applied the same pattern to Mcdonalds, the same way Starbucks once convinced everyone coffee can be as much as $8. This is all before tariffs. No one's giving tariffs a pass, but we are giving regular people a pass for some reason. It takes…

  The floor for prices on certain things have just gone up with no real reason other than "its about time we raised these prices", and it's happening in a collective way.
This invalidates every supply and demand theories. I'm unconvinced that you are right.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#350

Post by gottorf »

qzw wrote: post #322
tmaly wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust any government numbers regardless of who the president is. There will always be pressure to fudge the numbers to make who ever is running things look good. There use to be a billion prices project out of MIT that got shutdown years ago because it show higher inflation than what the rulers at the Fed wanted to show. I believe its funding was pulled or something like that.

What’s crazy is that of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about. It’s something that consumers can more or less directly observe, so having an official number that’s much below people’s “wallet meter” is doing nothing but erode trust in government. In fact, given that a steady inflation rate actually leads to bigger and bigger price increases,…

> of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about.

A lot of government liabilities are tied to CPI, so there's a strong incentive on the part of the government to under-report inflation.

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