121–130 of 204 posts
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American workers are highest paid in the world. The same evil “wealthy” investor class is not responsible for Americans getting the highest wages but is only responsible for job cuts? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average...
And here's a list of countries ranked by median income based on data from the World Bank. The US is "only" 5th by this measure. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
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Inflation (but not hyperinflation) benefits people in debt, and hurts people with savings. Is having savings nowadays considered intrinsically less moral or something? Inflation targeting of, say, 2%, is the balance that takes into account the sometimes competing interests of all these groups (savers, borrowers, wage earners, people who live off investments, etc). Deviation into either direction causes long-term stru…
Yes, savings are "intrinsically less moral" as savings are money not being used. And since wealth accumulates itself the more savings the more income inequality. It is intrinsically immoral that the wealth controlled by two dozen Western families is larger than the wealth of three billion people.
To me the headline says it all. Those workers, being in demand, asking for higher wages. What about our profits! We need a level of desperation in our work force, at least that caused by 4% unemployment, if we can expect to maintain the wealth gap that has been built up over the last years! (If it's not clear from the above, personally I am in favor of low unemployment and higher income equality.)
Did you read the article? It’s the anticipation of higher interest rates by the stock markets that send stocks down. And the Fed may do so because they want to raise them “just so much to counter inflation without drifting into a recession”. For Tech that may mean that the focus will shift towards profitability which may increase pressure on the workforce. What do you mean by “higher income equality”? E.g., people ea…
Everyone who makes a good faith effort to contribute to society is paid enough to have a decent quality of life (raise a family, own a home, afford medical bills, participate in recreation).
When a company succeeds, the employees receive a meaningful amount of the benefit. Not necessarily that they receive as much as the CEO (or even in the same order of magnitude) but that they are meaningfully rewarded.
Wealth inequality is not so great that the wealthy are effectively above the rules that apply to everyone else.
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Inflation benefits people in debt and light labor markets benefit people who earn a wage. It hurts people who already have accumulated capital in the form of bonds and stocks. The Fed acts to protect the interests of the very rich, at the expense of the lower and middle class. It is a balance. The government is a democracy and corporations need customers, but the wealth gap must be maintained, lest you lose the suppo…
> It hurts people who already have accumulated capital in the form of bonds and stocks. The Fed acts to protect the interests of the very rich, at the expense of the lower and middle class. You're forgetting the primary asset of the middle class: Housing. People purchase housing with mortgages. Inflation raises the price of their home and diminishes the impact of their mortgage debt. Inflation also helps people with…
You're assuming people with student debt are actually able to get jobs that can service that debt. That's not the case for 4/10 with student loans [0].
I'd even dispute that inflation is good for most Americans, given that just over 50% can't cover a $1000 emergency expense from savings[1], and nearly 2/3 are living paycheck to paycheck [2]. Nearly 3/4 of middle class Americans say their earnings are falling behind their cost of living [3].
I know you specifically weren't trying to paint inflation as an unvarnished good for middle class people, but other people commenting are making these points, and I just don't feel like making multiple comments to pick at those arguments.
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[0]: https://money.usnews.com/loans/student-loans/articles/survey...
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/15/amid-high-inflation-63percen...
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/amid-inflation-more-middle-c...
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Good luck to them. 10K boomers retire a day, there are less workers than jobs, and no benchmark rate will change that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34601350
My hypothesis is the offered wages are below the market clearing rates. People have a willingness to work for every price offered for their labor. If they aren’t filling positions then the wage is too low. Granted, if they raise rates to 10%+ they’ll drive the entire economy into the ditch. Then these jobs will disappear and prices will deflate-along with lots of horrific side effects. Edit-The US minimum wage is 7.2…
Mostly the second income in a household, and often the woman (who was lower paid in general anyway). Why return for $20 an hour when you cut all your daycare expenses, maybe even downsized? You'll have to offer a wage high enough to make it worthwhile.
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> The simpler reason is that it means that people believe Fed will read this as a license to not have to slow down rate increases But there's a direct relation, because the Fed has been very explicit that they're worried about employment and wage growth, and they're raising interest rates in order to depress those. The Fed operates according to the interests of the wealthy.
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Mostly for your own benefit but also to drive better conversation here, please review them.
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No one is going to write a mortgage for a lower rate than inflation unless they’re crazy (so the gov’t might, but even then not usually!). They’d be signing up to 100% burn their cash doing so. Inflation absolutely impacts mortgage rates, and all other lending.
So the standard mortgage rate is agreed on as "official inflation rate + x%"?
And the mortgage interest rate is set by the bond market, because thats who funds mortgages in the end (see Fannie and Freddie).
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In my experience, service sector working class people generally have no savings due to low wages and high cost of housing. I think it's not that people view saving as immoral; rather they view it as a class indicator. It appears that if the lower class starts seeing wage increases, then our economy falls apart and/or the Fed steps in to stop it. That suggests that our economy is broken with respect to the lower class…
> In my experience, service sector working class people generally have no savings due to low wages and high cost of housing. Statistically, a lot of middle class people save their wealth in their houses, which are bought via mortgages. Inflation benefits those people significantly by raising the value of their house and making their 30-year fixed mortgages (in the US) easier to pay off. It's not so great for people i…
However, many (most?) lower class people do not own homes. Even the lower side of middle class can't afford homes in much of the country.
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Anecdotally, there has been a striking increase in the amount of new service workers in training at restaurants and coffee shops in Portland. There was a very acute sense of labor shortage for the last few years, and that has gone. I’m hoping that we might see coffee shops (other than Dutch Bros) open past 3 PM someday. Enough operators to keep the buses, trains, ambulances, and 911 call center working are probably h…
Also anecdotally: We went to $CASUAL_DINING_MEGACHAIN recently. The food was much better than I remembered, but they were so understaffed the greeter was also working the kitchen. It took 20 minutes to be seated (due to the greeter stand being unmanned; there were plenty of tables), and about 2 hours to eat and pay. I suspect people are still being very picky about where they work.
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Good luck to them. 10K boomers retire a day, there are less workers than jobs, and no benchmark rate will change that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34601350
Not interest rates, but tanking stocks and investments absolutely will change that. If my retirement investments lose 50% of their value, I'll have to go back to work.