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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Approximation
https://jabberwocking.com/news-you-can-use-how-to-handle-numbers-like-
a-true-nerd/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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No shit. I don't need a history on inflation by you dude. Even Ted knows what inflation is.
But Biden* fucked everything up.
And no. It's not good to be a seller right now.
Guys like me get to come in and buy everything of yours for nothing when you're panic selling or just selling whatever isn't bolted in place just to pay the rent.
You have a kindergartner's view of economics.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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The Fed’s future is barreling toward us
Author Kevin Drum, Published on December 28, 2022 – 4:37 pm
If you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe the brilliant Cal economist Brad DeLong:
Remember: NONE of the interest-rate increases the Fed has undertaken since its lift-off from zero (see the graph, below) have yet had time to affect the real economy of demand, production, and employment. And NONE of the interest-rate increases the Fed has undertaken since its lift-off from zero will begin to have effects on inflation for at least another six months. The inflation trajectory is, so far, what it would have been had the Fed stayed at zero up to this moment. That means that there is, now, an awful lot of monetary contraction in the pipeline.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=YdFl
The thing to keep firmly in mind at all times is that we've been living in an artificial world since the start of the pandemic. Nothing is happening because of organic defects or strengths in the underlying economy, but because of either the pandemic itself or our response to it.
The Fed, however, can't bring itself to believe this. They continue to live in a world where inflation is a sign of deep economic cancer that has to be ruthlessly hacked away before it metastasizes—and damn the consequences. They simply can't abide the notion that the best response in our current situation was always to do nothing until the pandemic economy went away on its own.
So instead they did something. They made things worse. Huzzah. Poor people across the country are going to pay the price for this by next summer.
https://jabberwocking.com/the-feds-future-is-barreling-toward-us/ 
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=YdFQ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Just keep in mind that even your boy Krugman is backing out of the debate.
https://dnyuz.com/2022/12/26/is-the-inflation-storm-letting-up/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/opinion/is-the-inflation-storm-lett
ing-up.html?searchResultPosition=2
Not only did he admit his own shortcomings in this article here:
Quote:
What explains falling inflation? It now looks as if much, although not all, of the big inflation surge reflected one-time events associated with the pandemic and its aftermath — which was what Team Transitory (including me) claimed all along, except that transitory effects were both bigger and longer lasting than any of us imagined.
... but he then stated the following:
Quote:
So why shouldn’t we be celebrating? You can pick over the entrails of the inflation numbers looking for bad omens, but I’m ever less convinced that anybody, myself included, understands inflation well enough to do this in a useful way. Basically, as you exclude more and more items from your measure in search of “underlying” inflation, what you’re left with becomes increasingly strange and unreliable.
Credit where credit is due... Paul is actually shouldering some responsibility for getting everyone into this mess now. (Which by no coincidence has landed him in the "Opinion" doghouse at NYT).
I do have a lot of respect for somebody who can admit they were wrong... Particularly about something this impactful to so many people. I also have a lot of respect for people who can admit that they just don't know.
Taking off the smarmy-know-it-all-cunt mask is a good look for you, Paul. Let's see how long this lasts.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Are rising prices about monetary policy or about firms’ economic power to set their prices? Yes to both.
Opinion | The Football Game Theory of Inflation by Paul Krugman
If you don’t think of economists as party animals, you’re right. Or at least that’s the conclusion one might draw from the fact that several prominent economists carried on a thoughtful, earnest online debate about inflation over the past weekend — that is, on New Year’s Eve and the day after, when I thought we were supposed to be drinking champagne and then nursing hangovers.
But it really was a good discussion — the kind of thing I was looking for all those years ago when I chose economics as a profession, relatively free of politicization and nastiness. That is not to say that it was without political implications.
The discussion was kicked off by Olivier Blanchard, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (a towering figure in the profession, who happens to be one of the economists who has gotten recent inflation more or less right).
He started off by making a point that he said is “often lost in discussions of inflation and central bank policy.” He went on: “Inflation is fundamentally the outcome of the distributional conflict, between firms, workers and taxpayers. It stops only when the various players are forced to accept the outcome.”
https://twitter.com/ojblanchard1/status/1608967176232525824
Although Blanchard is nobody’s idea of a leftist, he nonetheless got immediate pushback from economists who insisted that inflation is always the result of excessive demand, of too much money chasing too few goods or, what is roughly the same thing, the consequence of an excessively hot economy.
https://twitter.com/JohnHCochrane/status/1608999009364119554
https://uneasymoney.com/2023/01/01/you-say-potato-i-say-potahto-you-sa
y-tomato-i-say-tomahto-you-say-distribution-i-say-expectation/
Others rose to Blanchard’s defense, notably M.I.T.’s Ivan Werning, who has been doing research on wage-price spirals. Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, also weighed in, praising Blanchard for bringing the role of economic power into the inflation discussion.
https://twitter.com/IvanWerning/status/1609272215647698944
https://twitter.com/econjared46/status/1609602823091617795
So what was all this about? To some extent it involved people talking past each other, emphasizing different aspects of the same story. But there are also some real policy issues that, as Blanchard suggested, tend to get lost when we think of inflation merely as a question for the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad.
At one level, of course Blanchard is right. Companies that charge higher prices and workers who demand higher wages aren’t doing so because the money supply has increased; they’re trying to increase their incomes (or offset declines in their incomes caused by, say, rising energy prices). And inflation happens when the attempts of firms and workers to claim a bigger share of the economic pie are inconsistent, when the additional purchasing power being demanded exceeds what the economy can deliver.
Reading the discussion, I found myself remembering a remark made way back in the 1970s by William Nordhaus, another eminent economist (and Nobel laureate) who happens to have been my first mentor in the field. Nordhaus compared inflation to what happens in a football stadium when the action on the field is especially exciting. (If you don’t find American football exciting, think of it as a soccer match.) Everyone stands up to get a better view, but this is collectively self-defeating — your view doesn’t improve because the people in front of you are also standing, and you’re less comfortable besides.
Now, what people who claim that inflation is caused by a hot economy are saying is, in effect, that while the immediate source of stadium discomfort is that people are trying to get a better view of the action at others’ expense, the root cause of the problem is that the game has gotten
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Write as many paragraphs as you'd like. None of this happened while Trump was President.
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LOL... Wow! Talk about a reach!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/three-pieces-of-good-economic-
news-for-the-new-year/ar-AA15Xlj5
Looks like this Annie Lowrey broad is propagandizing as hard as she possibly can.
P.S. Annie. Gas prices near me have increased $.50 per gallon in the last week.
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Quote:Do you really believe Trump had control over the economy rather than the Richest Americans in charge of Corporations? The Richest 1% (and especially the Richest 0.1%) run the economy, not the President. And it is Congress, State Legislatures, Counties, and Cities, not the President, who decide how the 46% of GDP is spent by the different levels of governments.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Write as many paragraphs as you'd like. None of this happened while Trump was President.
List of countries by government spending as percentage of GDP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_spending
_as_percentage_of_GDP
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Inflation is hydraulic, not something you change by clapping your hands
Author Kevin Drum Published on January 4, 2023 – 9:08 pm
The New York Times reports that the Fed is still worried about inflation:
Federal Reserve officials worried that inflation could remain uncomfortably fast, minutes from their December meeting showed, and some policymakers fretted that financial markets might incorrectly interpret their decision to raise interest rates more slowly as a sign that they were giving up the fight against America’s rapid price gains.
I get it. I'm not an economist, and it's easy to heckle from the cheap seats. If I were sitting on the Fed board I might feel more nervous about things.
But the Fed seems to have fallen completely into the rabbit hole of forward expectations. That is, they believe the Fed needs to credibly signal what it's going to do so that financial markets will respond "correctly."
There are some cases where this makes sense, mostly when you're dealing with a recession or a crash. If markets know that the Fed is committed to being a liquidity backstop, they will panic less and be less likely to produce a doom spiral.
But I just don't get the whole "forward expectations" school of thought when it comes to inflation. How are the markets going to respond? Will companies decide not to raise prices? Will workers decide not to ask for higher wages? I've never seen any credible evidence of this outside of hyperinflation episodes.
Rather, I continue to believe that inflation is fundamentally hydraulic. It goes up and down based on underlying movements of the economy, and that's it. These fundamentals might or might not include money supply, interest rates, tightness of labor markets, oil prices, endogenous variables, and so forth, all lagged by various amounts (oil hits inflation quickly, interest rates take a year or so). The Fed controls some of these, but (a) has only a modest impact and (b) has to be aware of lags.
In any case, I have no reason to think that expectations are on this list. Hell, Japan has been trying to raise inflation for years with no luck. And serious economists have taken to saying that nobody understands inflation. If that's the case, then why are so many people enthused about expectations, which strikes me as akin to clapping your hands or wearing a WIN (Whip Inflation Now) button? It just doesn't work.
But I'm open to argument on this. What's the best shortish piece around on the impact of expectations on inflation?
https://jabberwocking.com/inflation-is-hydraulic-not-something-you-cha
nge-by-clapping-your-hands/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Do you really believe Trump had control over the economy rather than the Richest Americans in charge of Corporations? The Richest 1% (and especially the Richest 0.1%) run the economy, not the President. And it is Congress, State Legislatures, Counties, and Cities, not the President, who decide how the 46% of GDP is spent by the different levels of governments.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Write as many paragraphs as you'd like. None of this happened while Trump was President.
Did I say that?
No.
All I said is that it is Objective FACT that none of this happened while Trump was President.
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