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U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

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Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#431

Post by jollyllama »

altdataseller wrote: post #428
orwin wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the states and the federal government can too, by destroying money (IE increasing taxes). Inflation, especially dollar inflation, is more complicated than 'printing more = inflation'.

I don't nobody loves taxes, and government wastes a lot of money, but doesn't some of that money goes back to the economy via government spending on infrastructure, workers, software, new projects, etc? So how is that destroying money?

Good question. It's destroying the money to the extent that it's servicing government debt.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#432

Post by [deleted] »

pojzon wrote: post #304
scythe wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it will take around 50 years That would be twice as long as it took the US to electrify 90% of farm houses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act > Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was a major proponent of the REA, which he helped pass in 1936 as Chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee. Rayburn stated in 1959 that ninety percent of farm homes in the U.S. were electrified, co…

How energy production looked like in 1930s vs now. How many charging points do we need now vs # those farms ? What was the quality of cable lanes used ? Did we consider off-grid then ? Whats the estimated cost in comparison to now ? You make it sound simple, but its not. Making that comparison is like comparing apples to oranges.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#433

Post by swayvil »

scottLobster wrote: post #345
dmix wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the same (mostly just to buy a house) and I've been using YNAB to budget money: https://www.youneedabudget.com/ It's really good, knowing where you're money is going ahead of time removes so much guilt and anxiety.

Oh yeah, I use Mint for the same. It's really fun watching my cost-cutting measures getting eaten alive by inflation in real-time :) I also find myself slowly sliding down Maslow's hierarchy. I used to be focused on achieving my dream job, now I'm strongly considering work I don't like because it pays more (being the sole income for my family is a major factor there as well). "Good enough pay for awesome work" is not…

I'm feeling that Maslow slide too. Expect a really clever money-making idea to come along any time now.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#435

Post by homeland221 »

Another questionable statistics. Bet in next announcement this number go up again. See if Fed will sit quiet and not raise any rate. Better tell Mark that his VR shouldnt have increase by 100 bucks! That is way higher than 8.5%. Same goes with those 6-7usd gas. Surely 8.5% on a dollar is just 8.5cent!

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#436

Post by twoodfin »

hajile wrote: post #426

Median income in 1990 was $50,500. Adjusting for inflation using CPI, that's $102,700 in 2020 money, but median income for 2020 was actually $67,500. Since 2020, this has been kicked into overdrive. I believe wholesale goods inflation is somewhere near 30% since the pandemic began (inflation numbers look lower because services -- aka wages -- don't increase at the same amount). The only people immune to inflation are…

Median income in 1990 was $50,500.

That's already in CPI-adjusted dollars. Nominal median household income in 1990 was $30k:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#437

Post by dragonwriter »

orwin wrote: post #282
moistofreason wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can, and have been, printing money like there is no tomorrow… they are literally the only body that can inflate the USD.

No, the states and the federal government can too, by destroying money (IE increasing taxes). Inflation, especially dollar inflation, is more complicated than 'printing more = inflation'.

> No, the states and the federal government can too, by destroying money (IE increasing taxes).

Destroying money (taxes, when fiscal policy is viewed through the lens of monetary effects) is counterinflationary. Creating money (spending) is inflationary. Broadly speaking.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#438

Post by trebbble »

mdip wrote: post #120
post_break wrote: post #36

Good news I guess. But my electricity price literally doubled. My house insurance is up 30%. My gas bill is up by a lot. Have you seen the price of oreos? The $5 box at Taco Bell is my splurge and I'm trying to cut back on everything I can.

Food is all over the place these days as long as that place is "up". We just stopped going to Taco Bell all together. It's kind of crazy. I can't find a reason to go there any longer. As a kid, they were so cheap[0], the running joke was that $20 worth of food there would kill a person. It was about properly priced -- despite being a fan of Taco Bell, their consistency between restaurants (better, today) was terrible…

> I took my kids there last weekend ... it was over $30.00 and I didn't eat. Fast food -- across the board -- has gone up.

This trend predates the current inflation.

Several major fast food chains appear to have worked out more effective price discrimination schemes that involve raising their menu prices to much higher than they used to be, then offering crazy discounts in their apps or via coupons.

It's always been possible to get significant discounts on fast food with coupons, but before they seemed to think they needed to keep their menu prices at least non-crazy or it'd hurt business. Something changed and a whole bunch of them decided they no longer needed to keep menu prices in the realm of sanity—10-to-1 this happened so fast and uniformly because one or more of the big-3 management consulting firms pushed new "best practices" across the whole industry in short order.

Now the menu prices are WTF high, but you can get 50-90%(!) discounts using the apps and coupons and eat fast food daily without ever paying anywhere near menu price.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#439

Post by BuckRogers »

rootusrootus wrote: post #206
pojzon wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When ppl talk about EVs overtaking petrol all I can do is shake head. Infrastructure is not there and is not going to be there for EVs for a long time. Its not only gas stations but also power plants, transit cables, personel, supply chains, technology, laws and other. If we make good investments it will take around 50 years in some developed EU countries to reach appropriate infrastructure levels. In less developed…

I'm not saying EVs are going to overtake ICEV anytime in the next few years. But a 10% reduction in demand for gasoline would be huge. Not sure I'm feeling as pessimistic on infrastructure. A bunch of the infrastructure for EVs already exists and is wired to every house. Even if we converted 100% of all newly sold vehicles to EV today, the grid build-out required wouldn't be any harder than what we've done in the pas…

I agree and I see a lot of people concocting additional premises to make this seem like humanity's largest challenge. I would suspect many people are starting from where I am mentally on this topic. In my household we want to move to one gas/diesel vehicle, and one electric. If everyone did that it would be a significant shift in just about any related metric. You could leave everyone in rentals with gas vehicles, and if you have every single two car household with just one EV that's a massive change from today.

No reason to go further than that at this point in time. Even if we do go beyond to create a doomsday scenario for EVs, it will be worked out because few of these things are unanswerable open questions. If this were hinging on some technological homerun like figuring out fission or the Alcubierre drive then I would feel differently about it.

Re: U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%

#440

Post by sanderjd »

stall84 wrote: post #376
radioactivist wrote: post #97

So the year over year CPI increase each month this year (starting from January) was 7.5%, 7.9%, 8.5%, 8.3%, 8.6%, 9.1%, 8.5%. So this value has been jumping around a bit as it has been going up. This drop is being taken as good news -- but I worry whether this is really a meaningful drop or whether we are just over interpreting what could be a fundamentally noisy metric?

It's not a drop though .. If you read, it's saying the gasoline index (alone) dropped nearly 8% which resulted in a net-null even though ALL of the other indexes continued to inflate... This isn't great.. And on top of it look at the number 1 comment here.. People are making concerted efforts to reign-in spending .. Which is excellent financial discipline.. but it's potentially very dangerous for this type of economy…

This is why core CPI exists, to remove volatile components. It was above headline, but also slowing.
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