201–210 of 239 posts
Nobody will ever make the connection between this, and the lockdowns they imposed on humans. Well, nobody "respectable" so the status followers won't ever hold the opinion where it matters, the court. "When you are paid not to notice, it is hard to notice" etc.
As usual, take headlines about inflation with a grain of salt. Yes, the year-over-year inflation reached a new peak. But the month-over-month inflation rate has actually been declining since last October: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm So when organizations publish a new article every month saying inflation is "accelerating", they're being incredibly misleading.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
It's fair to say that inflation has been at an accelerated rate over a time period that makes sense to most folks. Saying that it has decreased month-to-month is more misleading in my opinion. If you were to pick any random period in time, chances are inflation wouldn't be increasing as fast as it has been over those recent "declining" months.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought into the shadowstats guy for a long time, until he admitted he makes up his numbers. It's all bogus.
Source?
Inflation is a good thing for people with a lot of debt but not a lot of money. Think of the millions of student debt borrowers. Even if student debt isn't cancelled, it may get effectively cancelled one way or another. Which just goes to show, if WSJ or Bloomberg say something is bad, it may not actually be bad for you. Let's just hope the pressure stays up so wages keep on increasing. EDIT: I'd like to add, wage gr…
Is student debt with variable interest rates or just a fixed rate? Because variable interest rates can get quite high due to inflation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a good reason to never let rates get this low in the first place My brother-in-law remarked that "the fed is overdue to raise rates". My reply: asset prices don't matter to ordinary people. You already know this, but the Fed's mandate is "price stability and full employment". Full employment is going great -- the job market is tight, low-end labor is seeing lots of wage growth, everyone who wants a job is getting o…
>My reply: asset prices don't matter to ordinary people. Home values matter enormously to people. So does the value of their 401k, especially those aged 50+
Earlier quoted context omitted.
sucks for people like me with no debts though.
I was thinking about buying a truck recently and I got this bit of advice: "a loan is a hedge against inflation". More specifically, a fixed interest rate loan is a hedge against inflation. You are borrowing at an initial dollar value of A (in terms of inflation), and servicing your debt at a fixed rate, for a fixed time. During that time the value of the dollar decreases, and you now have a value of This presumes th…
There are many competing theories for this inflation: 1. The increase in money supply. 2. Supply chain bottlenecks. 3. Corporate greed & tech monopolies. 4. Fundamental supply constraints. (mostly in the housing sector) Anybody trying to tell you that it's only or primarily one of them has a political motivation. It's all 4, with the first 2 being primary and both being important. To effectively solve inflation we ne…
"To effectively solve inflation we need to attack all 4." Why do you think that? You've listed four conceivable reasons for inflation. One could probably list another 20 after a bit more thought. That doesn't mean that these are all plausible. It seems entirely possible that just one of them accounts for just about all of the inflation. You haven't made any argument against this. Of the four you list, (3) and (4) see…
Those are the 4 I've heard politicians and pundits mention. I could name 20 more, but experts aren't naming them.
3&4 are long standing problems, sure. 3 is the anti-big tech anti-trust crowd. Big Tech makes a substantial portion of the profits in America, and that is fairly recent.
Re: 4. Housing costs are a big portion of the inflation index, so tackling that issue will substantially reduce inflation even if it's not a recent problem. It's also the issue that's best addressed by local politicians, in a way that the other 3 can't be.
There are many competing theories for this inflation: 1. The increase in money supply. 2. Supply chain bottlenecks. 3. Corporate greed & tech monopolies. 4. Fundamental supply constraints. (mostly in the housing sector) Anybody trying to tell you that it's only or primarily one of them has a political motivation. It's all 4, with the first 2 being primary and both being important. To effectively solve inflation we ne…
"To effectively solve inflation we need to attack all 4." Why do you think that? You've listed four conceivable reasons for inflation. One could probably list another 20 after a bit more thought. That doesn't mean that these are all plausible. It seems entirely possible that just one of them accounts for just about all of the inflation. You haven't made any argument against this. Of the four you list, (3) and (4) see…
If the problem is supply chain constraints, inflation will be quite varied among the sectors. And this is true, with used cars leading the way at 41%.
If the problem is the money supply, inflation will be fairly even across the sectors. And while the sectoral components are quite different, they are becoming more similar over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be easier to dismiss online commenters as "armchair" if the experts at the wheel, with all the data, the models, and the PhDs at their command, were making more accurate predictions than them.
The consensus seems to be that “it’s transitory” still. I’ll believe it when I see it
I just look at housing prices as the input to a low pass filter with a 10-year pole, whose output is shelter costs, and I see the input is up tens of percent and the output is up 4ish percent, and that is enough to tell me we'll have a major inflation driver for ten years. Larry Summers says the same thing, so I'm pretty confident in my own predictions.