I'm surprised there's not an inflation thread yet
POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, June 11, 2026 17:04
VIEWED: 37356
PAGE 18 of 84
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You eat this? You're gonna die young, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Chicken Kiev at ALDI is 30 cents more expensive than it was a month ago before it disappeared only to be replaced with a version that is 5 ounces instead of 6 ounces.
Chicken Kiev at ALDI went up in price about as much as a used car did.
Nope. Not since I stopped drinking and went gluten free.
My old man does though, and his VA doctor tells him that he wishes he had my dad's bloodwork test results.
Quote:
"My Aldi Chicken Kiev only had one pubic hair in it"
SPOILER ALERT: You've probably eaten half a pound of pubic hair in your life, old man.
It's probably pretty racist to assume that it's pubic hair too.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
You must be mo betta smarter than everybody else. Because you know that you can pour unrefined oil into your gas tank, while rational folk are too stupid to know this. You must be getting close to triple digit IQ, as long as you double your current psychometric value.
Second is going to remain oblivious all the way until the Democrat's destruction in November.
He's had over a year to demand better of his party, but he won't do it.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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To Shale and Back, Redux
The price of oil, which was extremely low during the worst of the pandemic — it actually went below $0 for a brief, weird period — has spiked as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This price spike is adding to already high inflation, and it is inhibiting the Western response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression — governments are reluctant to tighten sanctions against Russian energy exports, lest rising prices anger their voters.
But shouldn’t we expect the market to help reduce this problem? Don’t higher prices provide an incentive to increase oil production outside Russia? Yes, they do, and there are in fact signs of at least some supply response to high prices. So far, however, most media accounts suggest that this response is limited, and that the U.S. oil industry — which is where most of the extra production would probably have to come from — is reluctant to expand.
OK, obligatory reminder that higher oil production would not necessarily be a good thing. The dangers of climate change just keep getting even more terrifying, and the world needs to wean itself from fossil fuels, not produce more. At best, you can make a St. Augustine argument — “Make me chaste and celibate, but not yet” — for higher oil production during the Ukraine war. But even that’s dubious.
Still, the tepid response of oil producers to very high prices needs explaining. Why aren’t they rushing in to take advantage of the Putin premium?
Of course, the usual suspects blame President Biden, who is responsible for everything bad — hey, I blame him for the fact that my first cup of coffee this morning was a bit weak. Or they denounce environmentalists and government regulation — remember the rush to blame the 2021 electricity crisis in Texas on renewable energy, when disrupted supplies of natural gas were actually the main factor?
But the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas recently carried out a survey of oil producers, asking them what was inhibiting their expansion, and for the most part they didn’t blame either regulators or environmentalists. Instead, they blamed their bankers.
What’s that about? The answer is, we’re looking at the aftermath of the debt-financed shale bubble of the 2010s.
The introduction of fracking — using high-pressure water to fracture shale containing trapped natural gas and oil — was, without question, a big deal. But many people in the business world (and, for what it’s worth, the national security community) treated it as a bigger deal than it was. I don’t know how to quantify this, but my sense all through the 2010s was that Very Serious People were far more enthusiastic about fracking than they were about the truly revolutionary advances in renewable energy. After all, extracting oil and gas sounded hardheaded and realistic, while a surprising number of influential people still associate solar and wind power with hippie fantasies.
And this Serious Person enthusiasm for hydrocarbons translated into a willingness to throw money at the fracking industry, which bled cash year after year but kept going by running up hundreds of billions in debt.
Eventually, however, this debt-financed boom hit a wall. The death of the former chief executive of Chesapeake Energy in 2016 seemed to mark the end of the industry. Chesapeake eventually became one of more than 230 oil and gas companies to declare bankruptcy since 2015. (Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake Energy CEO, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring "to rig bids for the purchase of oil and natural gas leases in northwest Oklahoma". Next day he killed himself.)
But the financial implosion of fracking didn’t provoke a broader financial crisis, as some observers worried. The bad news is that the aftermath of that implosion is, as I said, inhibiting the West’s response to Putin’s aggression today: Having been burned in the past, the energy sector’s bankers are keeping a tight leash on spending despite the surge in oil prices.
They may be overdoing it: Whatever happens in the war, it’s hard to see
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Quote:Would be funny if the whole Party followed his Libtard Lead and started pouring raw unrefined oil into their gas tanks like he does. Then they might be as smart as he is.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Second is going to remain oblivious all the way until the Democrat's destruction in November.
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
You must be mo betta smarter than everybody else. Because you know that you can pour unrefined oil into your gas tank, while rational folk are too stupid to know this. You must be getting close to triple digit IQ, as long as you double your current psychometric value.
He's had over a year to demand better of his party, but he won't do it.
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Crude Oil Prices: West Texas Intermediate
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=NnvX
US Regular All Formulations Gas Price
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Nnwb
Red Line - US Regular Conventional Gas Price
Black Line - Crude Oil Prices: West Texas Intermediate
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Nnwq
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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America’s inflation problem is weirdly hard to fix
America’s inflation problem, explained to the extent it is possible.
Inflation: Why? That’s the question many consumers have been finding themselves asking lately. Followed by inflation: Fix?
We’re in quite a conundrum when it comes to rising prices. Inflation is at a 40-year high in the United States and accelerating around the globe. The situation may very well get worse before it gets better, as Russia’s war on Ukraine stands to exacerbate price pressures, as does a new round of lockdowns in China due to Covid-19.
Among economists and experts, there’s no strict consensus about what exactly is to blame. There are certain factors widely agreed upon that we’ve been hearing about for months: supply chain woes, rising oil prices, shifting consumer demands. These concerns have hardly subsided. But there are other arenas where there’s more disagreement, such as the role government stimulus has played in increasing prices, and the possibility that corporate greed is an important factor.
The answer to the question of exactly why inflation is happening is kind of hard
Whichever economist or expert or policymaker you ask to explain the current inflation story to you is going to tell you something slightly different. I asked a bunch of economists over the past couple of weeks what was causing inflation and how to fix it. Most kind of laughed for a second before launching into their cases, acknowledging the full answer is, to a certain extent, ¯\_(”)_/¯.
I would like to be able to tell you a coherent story about inflation where everyone absolutely agrees with all certainty what is going on. But I cannot. So instead, I’m going to pop through some theories that some economists say are contributing and others say are not.
But it does feel a little iffy to say that giving less-well-off people benefits that included a little over $1,000 tanked the economy, given all the support the government gives to corporations and rich people all the time.
More at https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22994731/inflation-rate-russia-gas-price
s-jerome-powell
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The cause of inflation is STILL: Too much money hasing too few goods.
Banks, The Fed, the Treasury, have been inflating money supply for decades (easy loans, low interest rates/quantitative easing, deficit spending). This is not a DNC problem or a GOP problem, it is both.
At the same time, production has fallen or become inaccessible due to AMERICAN sanctions on Russian products (thanks Joe*), "green" energy policy, and offshoring jobs.
Production can't be "turned on" like a light switch, it takes investment and training, none of which the USA financial oligarchs are about to do. Even if we start now, it will be impossible for us to make industrial chemicals, fertilizer, textiles, antibiotics, chips etc any time in the next 5-10 years.
And SOME production can't be done at all, for example the USA has no titanium, palladium, etc, and we have used up all of our easily-accessible oil. Drought everywhere west of the Mississippi will make the winter wheat harvest small, and unless the drought turns around this spring, corn, soy and (ultimately) meat production will suffer.
OTOH if the money supply spigot is turned off, there will be no money to invest in production and it will become impossible for America to compete in the world market for scarce goods.
It's a conundrum, alright, and the only fix is mandatory investment in production. which our financial oligarchs are not about to allow.
*****
We can't do anything about rising fuel prices except buy smaller cars and conserve on home heating and electricity use. Can't do anything at all about rising consumer goods costs either. The only thing that can be mitigated is rising food prices, and that only by backyard gardening.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Quote:You're almost right, but per usual you have dragged in too many examples (chemicals, fertilizer, textiles, antibiotics, chips, titanium, palladium, corn, soy, meat) which muddles the stark simplicity of how prices are set.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The cause of inflation is STILL: Too much money chasing too few goods.
Banks, The Fed, the Treasury, have been inflating money supply for decades (easy loans, low interest rates/quantitative easing, deficit spending). This is not a DNC problem or a GOP problem, it is both.
You can see much better how inflation works if you look at the opposite, deflating prices, lower prices. In real estate, increasing the interest rates on mortgages will lower prices. If buyers can't afford a $350,000 house mortgage because the monthly payments on their mortgage have been raised too high, then sellers have to lower their prices until buyers can afford the mortgage payments on a smaller mortgage. Prices will go down only when buyers can not afford to pay more. And prices will go up, assuming the seller is neither stupid nor a generous family member, when buyers can pay more. Where it gets complicated is when mortgages have two interest rates, a low rate in the first years, then a high rate later. Buyers can be tricked into paying inflated prices with these mortgages. That mortgage trick is great for the sellers, but not so good for buyers who are suckered into bad deals. The math behind a bad deal is very simple and shows no mercy to buyers who don't think more than a year ahead because they are convinced real estate prices only increase.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/Housing/price-inflation
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-index
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Prices can go down when supply is greater than demand It's called a SUPPLY-damnd curve, for a reason
You picked a stupid example, bc home buying (demand) is highly multiplied by interest rates. Household purchases (food, gas, electricity, clothes, etc), usually paid for in cash, don't depend on interest rates. Demand is SOMEWHAT elastic, but you can't squeeze people below starvation levels without flirting with revolt.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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All those fake people who didn't exist and voted for Biden* are probably feeling pretty lousy about that right now.
--------------------------------------------------
Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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