Headline at the NYT. Excerpt:
No one better embodies the sudden break from decades of worry over inflation — in Washington and elite circles of economics — than Janet L. Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chair and current Treasury secretary.... “I have spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation,” Ms. Yellen told CNN earlier this month. “But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country. We have got to address that. That’s the biggest risk.”
[Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H.] Powell used a speech last week to push back on the idea that the economy was at risk of overheating. He said that prices could show a brief pop in the coming months... “That’s really not going to mean very much,” Mr. Powell said, noting that inflation has trended lower for decades. “Inflation dynamics will evolve, but it’s hard to make the case why they would evolve very suddenly, in this current situation.”
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56 comments:
Our government is investing in debt and false promises.
Nothing will ever change about this.
Invest accordingly.
Swamp People. So, when does the war start?
Hey, anybody hear from Joe today?
40% increase in US Dollar supply in the last 6 months.
Oh, it's coming, baby.
We don't need more stimulus. What we need are the governors and health departments getting out of the way of the people. Sending out stimulus checks that can't be spent because businesses are closed is a typical Democrat program, "It is a [program created] by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." If the money can't be spent on things like restaurants and vacations, it'll go into real estate and stocks, feeding an investment bubble. Or just raising the cost of everything since these "stimulus" checks can't increase production but will increase demand.
Now that's more assets are owned by the top 5% than ever before, inflation is no longer a risk.
Typical Democrat Voter: Hell, I love being poorer. Just don't make it too obvious. As long as those damn Republicans suffer, I'll take one for the team!
I can see I was unfair to Democrat voters. Let me clarify.
Well-to-do Democrat: This makes me richer or doesn't hurt me. Fuck everyone else!
Poor Democrat: Sure, this all this inflation is hurting me. But as long as those damn Republicans are hurting, its A-OK with me!
Mike of Snoqualmie said...
We don't need more stimulus. What we need are the governors and health departments getting out of the way of the people.
If you goal is a happy prosperous people that produce wealth and enjoy freedom you are right.
But this is not their goal.
So you can't work but here is some government cheese.
They are building the society they want to build. They know exactly what they are doing.
This is essentially the same as Dick Cheney’s reported “deficits don’t matter” comment after the dot-com bubble burst/9-11. It’s hardly remarkable that whichever side is in power in Washington favors cash in pockets now, consequences later.
If inflation is no big deal, then why stop at $1400? Why not give everyone a million dollars?
They apparently never heard of Venezuela.
"Fed officials argue that workers not getting enough stimulus help is a larger concern than potential spikes in consumer prices."
What do they think workers will be buying with those stimulus dollars?
Hence open borders. That will tap down that inflation by importing some more indentured slaves.
The most important thing is to keep "Volatile" markers out of your inflation calculation.
Things like food and gas.
Shared/shifted/insourced/outsourced responsibility.
Inflation can be a pretty; terrible thing. It tends to send interest rates way up. I had a friend who was investing in bonds in the late 1970s--Jimmy Carter era. Art (now long deceased) boasted of getting 16% interest on his money.
Inflation is certainly good for those with debt--nothing like repaying with cheaper dollars. But it's a bear for those on fixed incomes.
“But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country.
hmmm, maybe (just Maybe) we should be trying to get people back to work?
or...
maybe (just Maybe) we should Notice, that people ARE back to work?
Crude Oil on Nov. 3: $37.66/barrel
Crude Oil Feb 12: $59.47/barrel
Janet Yellen is on it. Wait until we start to get the totality of businesses that have had to permanently shutter due to government edict. Unemployment skyrocketing, mortgages, car payments, student loans going unpaid. Still, Biden will keep the borders open and encourage more insta-migration. More low wage workers to fill fewer spots. More loans going bust. Universities will be laying off hundreds of staff as well. There will be smaller colleges that will have to simply close because students are (a) not getting through schools- they're still being laid off from learning, and (b) don't have the money to go to the overpriced universities- their parents have lost everything, or have seen their wealth diminished. And no- Student Loans are no longer going to be doled out if they are not going to be paid back. Right on cue- Joe Biden nixes all student loans and so...the few tax payers left will be picking up that tab as well.
By this point the banks will be squealing loudly. At that point Janet Yellen will pull out the 'Trump Card' and put the blame on the previous administration. You know, she studied inflation for years.
Serious questions (with answers!)
What is the US unemployment rate at NOW? (6.3%)
What was the LOWEST US unemployment rate under President O'Bama's 1st term? (7.75%)
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
finally; Which is a better unemployment rate? 6.3%, or 7.75% ??
We will see. Sometimes I think we are Wile Coyote hanging in the air before he looks down.
Fight for $15,
Inflation,
But I got me a $1000 check, beatches!
Too bad a takeout chicken sandwich will soon be $18 bucks.
The government will save us, as government is the source of all innovation, growth, and prosperity.
Thank heavens Janet has the gender that can do no wrong.
gilbar points out the truth: There's no crisis. The unemployment rate is not a crisis. What's a crisis is governors shutting down their states and forcing unemployment to skyrocket. Our illustrious governor, King Jay I of Washington, shut down restaurants, bars and gyms in November. The unemployment rate increased 1.4% in December with 53,000 more unemployed. Our unemployment rate for December was 7.1%, way above the national average. The crisis solution is to lay off the governors and open the businesses.
Say people who don't have to worry about their paychecks...Biden 50 years at the pubic trough.
I am old; 15% five and then ten year CDs, mortgage rates st 14%; asking price of single family homes increasing 1/2 to 1% a month. James Earl Carter about to lose his rating to the Biden crime cartel.
My first mortgage had an interest rate of about 8% around 1980. That was due to the easy money policies of LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. LBJ had two big money pits, the Vietnam War and all of his Great Society programs. He couldn't pay for them so the Fed just printed money. Nixon tried wage and price controls that were a disaster; he didn't cut spending and all we got was more money chasing too few goods. Carter finally realized the correct solution and appointed Paul Volker as Fed chairman. It took several years to break the back of inflation, but it was finally conquered. Inflation has been declining ever since. Spending $2T on stimulus will just repeat LBJ's mistakes.
Achilles recognized the scam. In 2009, Obama removed food and fuel from the inflation calculation. Those 2 things make up a significant percentage of spending for the majority of 'replaceable residents'.
(I cannot, in good conscience, refer to anyone living in this former US Republic of the United States of America, as a citizen) We are not citizens.
We are not citizens.
We are Proles that exist to pay the pensions of bureaucrats that serve the State.
BTW...the powers that stole the last election to install their retard into the White House are not as clever as they think. Gonna need more razor wire around the Capitol City cesspool.
I can't help but get the feeling that all this money is pouring out of the US into foreign coffers and being tucked away by people and organizations. We're creating a web of dependencies to prop up the global order that's been in place in one form or another since 1945. The problem is that in doing so we're creating a huge amount of tension which cannot be relieved. At some point, it will fail, and the ripple effects will tear the old order apart.
Inflation will be the least of our worries.
Jimmy Carter was the worst president in the modern era until Obama and Biden. Obama had ascended into that place until Joe "Malvolio" Biden was elected. Now Malvolio has kicked Barrack out of first place into second, thereby bumping Jimmy into third place. Malvolio has a special talent for screwing things up.
It would be easier to believe in the expertise of Janet Yellen or Jerome H. Powell if (1) we didn’t have millennia of experience that tells us that they’re wrong, (2) experts in general hadn’t so thoroughly stunk up the place, particularly with respect to coronavirus, and (3) they had the same level of skin in the game that ordinary citizens have.
As long as the gooberment can adjust the content of the market basket that defines inflation we’re wasting our time complaining. If widget A doubles in price it is replaced by widget B. Rinse repeat.
About a week ago I saw an AP blurb in the local rag about some statement from Jerome Powell. Something to the effect that the mission of the Fed was to be sure everybody has enough money.
Hard times ahead.
“We need a living wage” - progressive
“We can’t afford $15/hr min wage” - free market
“Yeah we can, just print more money” - progressive
“But that would just cause inflation negating the point of increased wages” - free market
“Yeah, isn’t that great” - progressive
“The voters aren’t that stupid” - free market
“Did you read that Time article” - progressive
Well. it's not the pandemic, since we have reached the threshold of community immunity, and there have been low-risk, inexpensive, effective treatments since the beginning to reduce hospitalizations and deaths, Planned Parent/hood not withstanding.
Know-it-all Joe and his inexperienced SecTreas Janet Yellen are at it again - actually setting policy for the Fed to follow - which needs to happen according to Fortune:
One camp is convinced that the no-expense-spared fight against Covid-19 has put developed economies on course for rising prices on a scale they haven’t seen in decades. The other one says the virus is exacerbating the conditions of the past dozen years or so—when deflation, rather than overheating, has been the big threat.
Governments and central banks may face pressure to curtail their pandemic relief efforts, already worth some $20 trillion according to Bank of America, if they trigger a spike in prices. Workers and consumers will see the impact in wage packets and household bills. More than $40 trillion of retirement savings is at risk of erosion if inflation returns.
Charles Goodhart—a scholar at the London School of Economics who, at the age of 83, has seen a few orthodoxies rise and fall—argued in a recent paper that what happens to inflation after the pandemic “will affect macroeconomic theory and teaching, perhaps forever.”
Destroy capacity (ban fracking, kill a bunch of restaurants, shops etc).
raise the minimum wage.
voila, inflation.
Liberals think they can set the minimum wage to anything they want. Today it's $15/hr plus inflation increments. What they forget is the true minimum wage is 0, 'cause that's what a worker's going to get after he's laid off because the liberals have made his job too expensive. That's compassion in action.
Enough with links to NYT articles. I mean, really.
They've rigged the CPI to reduce SS and other govt pension COLA increases and overcome the bracket-creep protections in the income tax. It's the only way they know to avoid decreasing benefits as the Boomers retire. Growing the economy is right out. More White privileges and carbon increases.
Carter was incompetent, Obama was malevolent, and Biden just doesn't know.
Every few years we hear that inflation and government debt are of no concern to serious people. So far they have not been.
Everybody knows the story of [the] experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rapacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died, four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air. --Charles Dickens
NYT, quoting informed inside sources. Like the ones that helped them out on their Brian Sicknick "story"?
Humperdink said...Carter was incompetent, Obama was malevolent, and Biden..
--
you know the thing!
Even my 95-year-old mother is predicting a depression.
oh.....did I mention?? The ammo shelves at the sporting goods store are empty. It's like the NEW BitCoin.
Inflation is going to come. The government is betting on it. The silver lining for the government fisc is that inflation is a wonderful way to pay of nominal debt with debased currency. See the Weimar Republic. I recommend "When Money Dies" on this subject of using inflation to eliminate prior governmental debt.
For most of us geezers who comment here we remember the good old days of wearing our W.I.N buttons. I remember the days when I was getting 15% on Euro Dollar CD's in London. Of course short term interest rates where higher. Yellen is blowing smoke up our butts. Indeed all the current and present fed board members and secretaries of the treasury have been doing so for years. The government can fiddle all it wants on what it bases the CPI on but everyone knows when they are paying more for daily essentials.
Simply look at the Dollar relative to other currencies in the last 12 years. The Dollar is down against the Euro and down against the Swiss Franc. The CHF was par to the USD in 2009 ( when I invested there incase Obama was more Left ambitious than he turned out to be). Now it's $1.12 to the USD. The Euro has also increased. The only thing that has kept this from getting worse ( from the European view) is they also responded with the super low interest rates. What helps keep their currencies higher towards the USD is that collectively they don't run such massive deficits and trade imbalances. The Dollar is down 7% against the Chinese RMB since the fall. Once the lockdowns are finally mostly gone and the economy picks up expect prices increases across the board. Killing fracking lowers US output and increases the cost of imported oil. The Iranians and the Russians will be putting China Joe on their Christmas gift list. When things start to really get out of control and inflation has pretty much reduced the new Paul Volcker will raise rates however high to wring out inflation and with that will come huge pain.
For what it's worth, if and when the Democrats and Biden pretty much cripple domestic oil and gas production buy Canadian Dollars. They canucks are Lefty but unlike us they understand they don't have a world reserve currency and have to export to live and energy is a huge export business for them. Therefore when they start taking up part of US self-inflicted slack in energy production buy CDN. Keep your eyes on the Australian Dollar as well. Both were trading around .74 cents to one US and with the Chinese boom they want up to par with the US before settling down again to where they are now. It's a good bet that Biden and the Democrats will bring back good times to the Canadians and Australians.
If anyone believes either party will get serious about inflation forget about it. Not until tax rates and capital gains are indexed for inflation will they be plausibly serious.
Sorry about the typo "all the current and present".Should be all the current past fed chirmens and board members and treasury secretaries.
--- said...Carter was incompetent, Obama was malevolent, and Biden
Solzhenitsyn got 8 years for a reference to the man with the moustache, was it? Careful with the slanders, comrade. You've heard those commercials advising us to tell what we know. Eight years could sound merciful, soon. And it will be your responsibility.
---Enough with links to NYT articles. I mean, really.
It was a good newspaper 50 years ago. I'd bet Ms. Althouse still remembers the glory days of Tom Wicker and Russell Baker. That was the old model, when they told you what to think and gosh darn it, you thought it! Or lost status with the right people. That was a long time ago and a lot of errors and falsities since. Now it's hard to keep the NYT reporting scandals straight.
More than $40 trillion of retirement savings is at risk of erosion if inflation returns.
Kinda scary to think what would happen to our social fabric if large chunks of the elderly slip into poverty
Inflation is a tax on wealth, and these people know damn well what they're doing. It's not obvious because our trading partners are willing to settle trades in dollars, but that will certainly change if the government keeps printing like this, and when the dollars come flooding back we will go from a seemingly-wealthy country to Romania West.
Kinda scary to think what would happen to our social fabric if large chunks of the elderly slip into poverty
Planned Parent/hood.
Or, you know, we could just open the economy back up. The solution is kind of right there in front of us.
This is a government-mandated economic collapse. Almost the whole workforce is under 65. Everyone could have been at work and school without much death risk..
Baby boomers (of which I am one) are going to be the death of us.
For the life of me, I don't understand why the Democrats (or the Republicans, for that matter) don't propose elimination of the federal income tax for everyone with agi less than 100,000 (or say 150,000 for couples filing jointly). We all agree deficits don't matter these days.
It would be easier to believe in the expertise of Janet Yellen or Jerome H. Powell if (1) we didn’t have millennia of experience that tells us that they’re wrong
The experts believe they can control inflation now -- just as they believe they can control the climate and respiratory viruses.
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