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US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

bloomberg.com

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Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#401

Post by craftkiller »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #216
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast food chains are giant corporations. Where you would see the difference is in the mom and pop shop, who can now undercut the big chain and probably has better quality food.

Mom & Pop shops aren't present at most highway exits like the big chains, and would need to become unbelievably, impossibly successful locally to generate enough capital to expand widely. They can't effectively compete with major chains. It's not a meaningful expression of the other poster's point.

Are you a trucker? Maybe 0.3% of my meals come from highway exits. Most of my meals are from near my home.

> They can't effectively compete with major chains

I don't think they were suggesting a couple Mom & Pop shops become national chains. I think they were suggesting that collectively Mom & Pop shops could compete against the chains. If everyone replaced 50% of their chain fast food meals with mom & pop shops then each mom & pop shop might only see a small bump in orders but that would be devastating to the chains.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#402

Post by aurareturn »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #374
aurareturn wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In consumer markets, the notion of a rational consumer is a myth. If we had rational consumers then the world would be very, very different.

I'm unconvinced that you can get every competitor to agree on a price increase.

All it takes is for one business to see it as an opportunity to lower prices to gain more marketshare for everyone else to also have to lower prices.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#403

Post by AtlasBarfed »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #397
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> [Trump... Biden... ] I've never mentioned either, nor do I assume what you think about them. > So generally the overall political trend in the United States is to be like this. The question I'm pondering isn't "what the trend is to be" but rather "why it has to change". Thinking about who and how could change it should wait, lest we end up putting the cart before the horse. > You could ignore history if you want an…

So that's kind of the point. The Democrats are basically going this direction too. The Republicans since world war I have been inherently isolationist.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#404

Post by zug_zug »

Aurornis wrote: post #177
zug_zug wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to this, but I suspect something is afoot. I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.

> Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. University tuition is a known example of an extreme inflation outlier. The cause is also known: The availability of loan dollars and the laws preventing their discharge in bankruptcy. Tuition figures are also misleading because almost nobody pays that number. The tuition number is the maximum possible amount someone could pay without financial assistance, but wh…

My point is that it's part of the standard basket and the rate they allegedly calculated for its growth didn't match up to lived experience.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#405

Post by lovich »

elzbardico wrote: post #400
lovich wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is just lying. His edit shows that he isn’t actually focused on both sides but is trying to muddy the waters to blame specifically democrats. He couldn’t even keep the mask on for two statements

You assume a lot my boy

I did not, I called a spade a spade

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#406

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

aurareturn wrote: post #402
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In consumer markets, the notion of a rational consumer is a myth. If we had rational consumers then the world would be very, very different.

I'm unconvinced that you can get every competitor to agree on a price increase. All it takes is for one business to see it as an opportunity to lower prices to gain more marketshare for everyone else to also have to lower prices.

> All it takes is for one business to see it as an opportunity to lower prices to gain more marketshare for everyone else to also have to lower prices.

This would again, be true in a very simplified world. A lot of the time your suppliers have committed to provide X widgets by Y date at Z place, and it's not trivial to swap out A widget provider for B widget provider.

And this is the easy case, how much would it cost to rebuild all your LLM based tools with Anthropic after building on OpenAI.

So, yeah in theory it requires perfect co-ordination but really if there are 4 big suppliers and 3 increase price, their profits will increase and the CEO of the other will probably be fired by the board.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#407

Post by jjk166 »

wqaatwt wrote: post #393
jjk166 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hig…

> but really the average was quite stable from 1982 to 2004 It was falling at a stable pace for 20 years in nominal terms. I don’t see how can someone see anything else looking at the price chart. And inflation was still 4-5% through the 80s and didn’t fall to 2% until 2000. So it was a horrible asset to hold. Just buying government bonds in the 80s and 90s was a much better idea.

> It was falling at a stable pace for 20 years in nominal terms.

It was not. Look at the chart: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...

Between 1984 and 1996, 131 of the 156 months were within $50 of the average nominal price, and the lowest point, December 1984, was only $89 below the average. In particular from 1993 to 1996 the price was never more than $10 off average. If you bought gold in July 1979, which was an all time high at the time, the nominal value of your gold never decreased.

Looking at the inflation adjusted numbers there is much more volatility, but again, the value of gold in Jan 1989 was the same as the value of gold in Jan 1979. If you happened to buy gold during its peak in Jan 1980, you wouldn't see an inflation adjusted profit until October 2024.

Gold is not generally a good asset to hold to make money, but that's not what is under discussion here. The question is can the value of gold be used as a proxy for inflation. Gold going up is like smelling smoke - you know there is a fire. I am not arguing that inhaling large quantities of smoke is the best way to protect yourself during a fire.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#408

Post by fragmede »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #399
fragmede wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anti-intellectualism really the look you're going for?

That’s funny, I’m looking for intellectual honesty. And honestly admitting no one here really has any fucking clue about global trade, economic effects, and policy would be a good start. Nah.. “I’m an intellectual , I read tech blogs and listen to NPR… I’ve never made anything outside of a computer program, but listen to my opinion on tariffs that happens to align with all my media sources!”

Being and intellectual and having credentials are two separate things. There are plenty of people here who build things in the "real" world, eg chips, trading systems, distributed infra, biotech. They still want to discuss policy because those policies shape what gets built and where.

It’s fine to call out overconfidence, but dismissing everyone as clueless is just another flavor of anti-intellectualism. The real intellectual honesty is admitting:

1. We’re all partial amateurs outside our domains.

2. Policy and trade affect everyone, not just specialists.

3. Listening and engaging beats sneering at “NPR readers.”

If you think most opinions here are shallow, good for you! You set the scene though, so maybe contributing depth instead of punching down?

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#409

Post by flanked-evergl »

dragontamer wrote: post #101
flanked-evergl wrote: post #54

In Norway our food prices has gone up by more than 4 in one month while we are destroying any capacity for local production while we have protectionism that would make Trump blush. How is that not newsworthy, but this is?

In the USA, food prices are non-core inflation and most volatile indeed. Food prices go up because of random weather events (or locus or disease). USA beef prices are skyrocketing because of some new disease for example. Anyone who says that a monthly food price change is an underlying indicator of overall inflation is simply lying to you.

Food prices in Norway are going up because the government keeps importing people who do not want to work, and then they give those people our tax money so that they can compete with us in the labour and food markets, which are heavily restricted. It has 0 things to do with the weather or some disease.

The main change is that the central bank dropped interest rates while inflation was already way above target (about twice the target inflation rate), and they did that to help the socialist party in govenment win the election, the problem is that dropping interest rates while inflation is already high and then while you still import more tax leeches results in a massive spike in inflation.

Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

#410

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

fragmede wrote: post #408
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s funny, I’m looking for intellectual honesty. And honestly admitting no one here really has any fucking clue about global trade, economic effects, and policy would be a good start. Nah.. “I’m an intellectual , I read tech blogs and listen to NPR… I’ve never made anything outside of a computer program, but listen to my opinion on tariffs that happens to align with all my media sources!”

Being and intellectual and having credentials are two separate things. There are plenty of people here who build things in the "real" world, eg chips, trading systems, distributed infra, biotech. They still want to discuss policy because those policies shape what gets built and where. It’s fine to call out overconfidence, but dismissing everyone as clueless is just another flavor of anti-intellectualism. The real int…

You know it’s free to admit what we both know this is.

It’s some lying, it’s some pretending, it’s crying, it’s some footstomping, it’s some complete bullshit. And every now and then small nuggets of facts are seen sometimes even intentionally.

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