I'm surprised there's not an inflation thread yet
POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, June 11, 2026 17:04
VIEWED: 37356
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LOL
You're dumb as dirt.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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For Proof That Corporate Greed Is Driving the Inflation Crisis, Look to the Car Industry
By Branko Marcetic
The supply chain disruptions caused by pandemic lockdowns have been a leading cause of the economic chaos of recent years, feeding the rage of consumers paying sky-high prices for suddenly scarcer goods. But they’ve also been a bonanza for the firms making those goods, who have outright admitted to using the headlines about inflation to tack on added price markups to their products, whether it’s eggs, airplane tickets, or electricity.
Maybe no product has embodied today’s inflationary pressures quite like cars have, as shortages of parts coupled with continuing strong demand for vehicles has sent their prices soaring. While we’ve been told that firms are simply passing along higher production costs to consumers, car dealers have also been making record profits, with Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond president Tom Barkin telling the New York Times that carmakers and dealers had “discovered that a low-volume, higher-price model was actually a very profitable model.” A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study from this past April determined that dealer markups contributed majorly to inflation in the price of new cars.
This is backed up by the words of the executives of the country’s largest dealerships themselves, who on earnings calls have explicitly talked about selling cars at inflated prices and making a tidy profit. It points to the need for robust government action to provide relief for consumers against such private sector greed.
“We Actually Would Have Made Less Money”
Take CarMax, the largest used car dealer in the United States. On an earnings call this past April, CEO Bill Nash explained how the firm’s “extensive price elasticity tests,” which look at what happens to the level of demand when prices are raised or lowered, convinced the company it could safely get away with the very low-volume, higher-price model Barkin spoke about. The company had “determined that we could have sold a few more cars, but we actually would have made less money,” Nash explained.
On an earlier earnings call from December 2022, Nash responded to questions about other competitors lowering their prices to move cars off their lots and how that would impact CarMax’s strategy. Nash again cited the firm’s determination that they would have made less money, concluding that “what I’ve always said is . . . what we’re going after is profitable long-term market share gains.” He mentioned that the firm had price-tested both up and down, which “gives us confidence that we made the right decision from a profitability standpoint.”
“In a lot of cases,” Nash said about his competitors’ strategy to sell more units by dropping prices, “it’s not sustainable over the long term because you’re just not making the money that you need to.”
It’s a similar case with Lithia Motors, as of last year the largest dealership group in the country. Asked in a February 2022 earnings call if he was “seeing any hesitation at all among consumers to the elevated prices,” executive vice president Chris Holzshu replied, “Absolutely not.”
“Demand is very high right now, and we’re taking advantage as much as possible in both new and used in that capacity,” he said.
Asked if the firm was selling above the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), the cost that carmarkers like Ford or Nissan recommend dealers should sell a vehicle for, CEO Bryan DeBoer answered, “We do have some stores that are charging over MSRP.”
“We allow our network to make the decisions closest to what their customer base is and what the supply and demand is in that local market,” he added.
AutoNation chief financial officer Joe Lower likewise told investors in February 2023 that “more than half of our vehicles were sold at or above MSRP” in the previous year’s fourth quarter, which had “trended down, but it’s still far higher than historical levels.” The quarter before that, CEO Mike Manley noted that revenue was up 4 percent to $6.7 billion, “driven by higher av
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What was once labeled a “conspiracy theory” — that much of the inflation we’re seeing is driven by corporate greed to feed record profits — is now more and more being widely acknowledged as reality. But unfortunately, those in power are still yet to do much about it, whether instituting price controls to prevent corporate price gouging or passing a windfall tax to claw back the inflated profits that result. And it’s the ordinary American worker who’s being stuck with the bill.
This you?
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61343&mid=11759
71#1175971
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It doesn't seem like that, at all. It seems like you are a highly motivated promoter of conspiracy theories.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Seems like our own deep state is doing a better job of upending democracy, AND they get to blame Russia for it!
Research reveals what kind of people fall for conspiracy theories
People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations.
People who believe in conspiracy theories tend to be insecure and paranoid, suggests a new study.
Conspiracy theorists are also likely to be emotionally volatile and impulsive, according to the findings.
But they're not all mentally unstable, say psychologists.
They found that people can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations.
These include relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment.
The results of the study, published online in the journal Psychological Bulletin, paint a "nuanced" picture of what drives conspiracy theorists, according to lead author Shauna Bowes.
“Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks – a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture,” said Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University.
“Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.”
She said previous research on what drives conspiracy theorists had mainly looked separately at personality and motivation.
The new study aimed to examine those factors together to arrive at a more unified account of why people believe in conspiracy theories.
The research team analyzed data from 170 studies involving more than 158,000 participants, mainly in the UK, USA and Poland.
They focused on studies that measured participants’ motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.
The team found that, overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.
More at https://talker.news/2023/06/26/research-reveals-what-kind-of-people-fa
ll-for-conspiracy-theories/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Is the US getting too expensive to live in? Many Americans worry about economy, inflation
https://news.yahoo.com/us-getting-too-expensive-live-095212724.html
Quote:
As Americans look ahead to another Independence Day and a likely contentious 2024 presidential election, many are feeling fiscal pain as the prices of food, shelter, healthcare and transportation climb higher than their paychecks. About 52% of Americans participating in a USA TODAY/Suffolk Poll said the United States is too expensive to live in. And about seven in 10 Americans said stifling inflation and the economy are the nation's top problems today, according to a new Pew Center survey. A majority across age, gender and race told Pew inflation is "a very big problem."
"Their spending power has been minimized," said Gene Ludwig, former head Comptroller of the Currency, a U.S. Treasury Department bureau.
America's economic state is uncertain
What's America’s economic state? Frustrating and uncertain. The typical American household spends about $768 more on monthly purchasing goods and services these days compared to 2020 because of high inflation, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, said.
Meanwhile, as the United States skirts a recession, Zandi said some Americans seeking relief are also dipping into their savings for survival. Around 25 million Americans are behind on their credit card, auto loan or personal loan payments, according to a recent Moody’s/Equifax data analysis. Also, the delinquency rate for bank credit cards was 3.27% in May, nearly two points higher than in 2021, Zandi said.
Nobody gives a shit about Ukraine.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Inflation around the world
Author Kevin Drum
Published on June 28, 2023 – 11:05 am
When you look at some sort of domestic trend or other, it's often helpful to look also at the rest of the world. This was one of the things that tipped me off about the connection between lead and crime, for example. Everyone knew that crime in the US had dropped during the '90s, and this had prompted a rash of theories to explain it: drugs, policing, abortion, broken windows, a growing economy, etc. But it turned out that crime was also down in Canada. And Germany. And Britain. And Australia. And all over the rest of the world. Clearly something had to be going on that wasn't unique to the US.
Today, the CEA does a similar exercise for inflation in the G7 large economies (mostly Europe). Here it is:
This got me curious about smaller, less central economies. So I grabbed a few inflation rates from other continents:
Obviously there are differences, but not big ones. What this means is that inflation in the US almost certainly has little to do with domestic policies like the stimulus bill or easy money from the Fed. Inflation is a global phenomena, hitting everyone at roughly the same time and then declining at roughly the same time.
In other words, it's COVID. It's supply chains. It's shortages. It's oil prices.
There can still be idiosyncratic explanations for parts of the picture. In the US, eviction moratoriums at the start of the pandemic pushed up rental prices. Stimulus spending was higher than in many places and probably added a point or two to the inflation rate temporarily.
But these are small things. In a nutshell, it's COVID. It's supply chains. It's shortages. It's oil prices. Those things are all going away naturally, and inflation will shortly go away along with them.
https://jabberwocking.com/inflation-around-the-world/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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LOL
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:I'm not surprised you reacted the same as angry poor white trash would in East Texas. Here is more for you to react like a poor ignoramus who knew everything he'd ever learn about money before he was 15 years old:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
LOL
Gross Domestic Product: Implicit Price Deflator
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=16AlB
Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=16AlQ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I'm not surprised you reacted the same as angry poor white trash would in East Texas. Here is more for you to react like a poor ignoramus who knew everything he'd ever learn about money before he was 15 years old:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
LOL
How was work this week, honey?
Not poor. Haven't worked for over 4 years now and not even close to poor.
You don't know shit about money or the economy, dummy.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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Price of stamps 66 cents.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Inflation around the world
Author Kevin Drum
Published on June 28, 2023 – 11:05 am
When you look at some sort of domestic trend or other, it's often helpful to look also at the rest of the world. This was one of the things that tipped me off about the connection between lead and crime, for example. Everyone knew that crime in the US had dropped during the '90s, and this had prompted a rash of theories to explain it: drugs, policing, abortion, broken windows, a growing economy, etc. But it turned out that crime was also down in Canada. And Germany. And Britain. And Australia. And all over the rest of the world. Clearly something had to be going on that wasn't unique to the US.
Today, the CEA does a similar exercise for inflation in the G7 large economies (mostly Europe). Here it is:
Quote:This helps show that both sloppyseconds and that idiot Drum both don't know how to read a graph.
This got me curious about smaller, less central economies. So I grabbed a few inflation rates from other continents:
Only Japan is actually shown with negative inflation, which is what is needed for correction.
Obviously there are differences, but not big ones. What this means is that inflation in the US almost certainly has little to do with domestic policies like the stimulus bill or easy money from the Fed. Inflation is a global phenomena, hitting everyone at roughly the same time and then declining at roughly the same time.
In other words, it's COVID. It's supply chains. It's shortages. It's oil prices.
There can still be idiosyncratic explanations for parts of the picture. In the US, eviction moratoriums at the start of the pandemic pushed up rental prices. Stimulus spending was higher than in many places and probably added a point or two to the inflation rate temporarily.
But these are small things. In a nutshell, it's COVID. It's supply chains. It's shortages. It's oil prices. Those things are all going away naturally, and inflation will shortly go away along with them.
https://jabberwocking.com/inflation-around-the-world/
Also, where is China?
The graph shows that, as the world's most powerful and influential Economic power, the rest of the world follows the disasters that Libtard voters in America elect. Other, smaller economies lag behind, and suffer from, America's Economy. Note that Canada is the closest follower.
the info states it is year-over year inflation. The US has the lowest first because it was the first to peak exorbitant Bidenflation, so now comparatively it is lower than the excessive high a year ago. The other nations have not followed the graph as low - yet - because they peaked later, after USA inflicted Bidenflation upon the world.
Other nations tried to get off the nutso roller coaster as it was climbing early on, but Bidenflation was just too powerful.
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