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

381–390 of 412 posts

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#381

Post by [deleted] »

steveBK123 wrote: post #379
altairprime wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sure, tax the rich! Specifically, I would start with break up the untaxable trusts and corporate holdings exemptions, and cancel the real estate “unrented properties” tax rebate so that they’re forced to lease at market rates or otherwise sell dormant property holdings. But that’s not going to have any effect on inflation, so I’m not going to discuss that further it in this inflation-focused post. If you tax corp…

Georgism as a way to tax wealth in a sensible pro-growth fashion is probably the ideal that we'll never achieve Instead we get rhetoric, middle class taxes, and upper class tax breaks

[deleted]

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#382

Post by altairprime »

steveBK123 wrote: post #379
altairprime wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sure, tax the rich! Specifically, I would start with break up the untaxable trusts and corporate holdings exemptions, and cancel the real estate “unrented properties” tax rebate so that they’re forced to lease at market rates or otherwise sell dormant property holdings. But that’s not going to have any effect on inflation, so I’m not going to discuss that further it in this inflation-focused post. If you tax corp…

Georgism as a way to tax wealth in a sensible pro-growth fashion is probably the ideal that we'll never achieve Instead we get rhetoric, middle class taxes, and upper class tax breaks

I’ll read up on it, thanks!

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#383

Post by wqaatwt »

dchftcs wrote: post #371
wqaatwt wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lagging by 10-20 years like between 1980 - 2002 when it declined even in nominal terms despite consumer prices more than doubling? If you bought in 1980 you would have had to wait until 2024 to break even when adjusted by CPI…

Over a time frame of multiple decades, it's been volatile but overall kept pace with money supply. Timing is always tricky, even with SP500 which has given higher return. Maybe "good at" was stretching it, but there are things that lagged forever, such as a retail savings account and Japanese government bonds. It's tracked CPI better than silver.

Due to obvious reason only the period after Bretton Woods counts.

So 55 years. 1980 and 2001 was almost half of that and the real price of gold declined by 4-5x. If you take out the spike in the late it’s still almost 2x or so compared to the 70s (very volatile period).

This wasn’t lag. M2 supply grew continuously and increased by >3x during he two decades while even the nominal price of gold declined.

After the gold standard was abandoned it became a highly speculative volatile asset.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#385

Post by vel0city »

cpburns2009 wrote: post #380
vel0city wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, if the "real" inflation rate was ~10% starting in 1996 then a $5 burger today supposedly cost ~$0.30 in 1996. A lot of soda vending machines will sell a 20oz bottle of soda for ~$2.50. Were soda vending machines selling bottles of soda for $0.15 back then? No.

I distinctly remember McDonald's regular hamburgers costing around $0.30-0.40 in the mid '90s which costs around $4 now.

McDonald's regular hamburgers don't cost anywhere near $4 for most people. A hamburger at the McDonald's down the street from me costs $1.59. A cheeseburger costs $1.79. A double cheeseburger costs $2.79. A Quarter Pounder w/Cheese meal today is ~$8 today, in the 90s it was ~$3.

I remember you could get two cheeseburgers for a dollar in the late 90s, so ~$0.50. The inflation rate for something to go from $0.50 to $1.79 that's a 4.5% inflation rate, still quite a way off from people's arguments of 10%. And for the QPC meal comparison, that's ~3.3%. Higher than 2% for sure, but its also a single restaurant comparison on a single item here where its highest cost component (beef patty) has experienced overall higher rates of inflation compared to most other things. A restaurant that many people feel has gone up in price more than expectations of the rest of prices.

Link for the $3 90's price for a QPC: https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years...

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#386

Post by steveBK123 »

altairprime wrote: post #382
steveBK123 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgism as a way to tax wealth in a sensible pro-growth fashion is probably the ideal that we'll never achieve Instead we get rhetoric, middle class taxes, and upper class tax breaks

I’ll read up on it, thanks!

Land Value Tax is key element

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#387

Post by AtlasBarfed »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #377
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What you really need to understand is that we can, and we must absolutely, generally and non-exceptionally have low inflation at all times. There's absolutely no sane reason to have high inflation in a low-corruption financial…

Do you think I'm advocating for inflation as an institution?

History is history. Maybe you think AI is going to herald in some era of non-inflation and free people from the control of the ultra rich.

It's pretty apparent to me that AI isn't going to do that. It's going to do very very very very very much the opposite.

I agree that disruption of trade leads to wars. Usually of very large scale but we haven't had one of those since the advent of nuclear weapons.

And people keep misinterpreting my comment that I believe Donald Trump has good policy. I absolutely don't. That's why I said the tariffs are insane. Theoretically what Donald Trump wants to do is bring manufacturing back to his white voters in the former middle class, and bring the US into an isolationist stance.

Biden did not put troops on the ground in Ukraine. I believe bush II would have enthusiastically. Biden did not roll back the tarriffs Trump imposed in his first term either.

So generally the overall political trend in the United States is to be like this.

Ask the rest of your comment. You could ignore history if you want and hope for something different. But.... Well you should know the quote about history, and I don't want to have to repeat it:-)

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#388

Post by jjk166 »

lovich wrote: post #360
jjk166 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago (ie mid 2000s) was a unique time of extremely high gas prices with 2008 being the all time high both adjusted for inflation and absolute. Adjusted for inflation, oil is currently higher than any point between 1990 and 2004, and in absolute terms since 2022 its been higher than any point outside of the 2006-2014 period.

It’s really not https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000074714 This is only the nominal price, I can’t find the inflation adjusted graph, but I assume it’s clear that if the nominal price now is the same as several other periods over 10 years ago, then the gas today is cheaper over inflation adjusted dollar

it really is

https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

Note 10 years ago is 2015. The period over 10 years ago is the period of extremely high prices under discussion(mid 2000s to 2014)

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#389

Post by jjk166 »

wqaatwt wrote: post #369
jjk166 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why gold is a useful proxy. The price of gold is pretty much purely a function of how much money speculators have in their pockets. If inflation is high, it means there are more dollars that can go into gold speculation, driving up the nominal cost of gold. If the cost of gold is going down, it means the dollar is strong by comparison. If you used a proxy that had a significant utility in its own right…

I assume you never tried looking at the price of gold in the 80s and 90s? i.e. it declined in nominal rates and collapsed by almost 4x if adjusted by CPI

I don't see how that conflicts with my point. The period from Jan 1978 to Jan 1982 was a momentary spike, peaking January 1980, which was nearly 3 times the long term average from 1971 to 2008. If you set that as your baseline, everything looks like a massive decline, but really the average was quite stable from 1982 to 2004. Note that the period of the spike in gold price (1978 to 1982) was a period of extremely high inflation.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#390

Post by ibrahimsow1 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #379
altairprime wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sure, tax the rich! Specifically, I would start with break up the untaxable trusts and corporate holdings exemptions, and cancel the real estate “unrented properties” tax rebate so that they’re forced to lease at market rates or otherwise sell dormant property holdings. But that’s not going to have any effect on inflation, so I’m not going to discuss that further it in this inflation-focused post. If you tax corp…

Georgism as a way to tax wealth in a sensible pro-growth fashion is probably the ideal that we'll never achieve Instead we get rhetoric, middle class taxes, and upper class tax breaks

Huge plus one
Post reply on HN