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2021 - Is inflation finally back in the conversation?


Reagan1k

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7 minutes ago, Captainant said:

 

Lulz, well it's always a crapshoot if surlysearch works or not, but here's some that I've found:

 

And like, shit, there was a whole quarter where everyone was bigly concerned over the "fed wage price spiral". It's literally fed policy to attack wages as a means of controlling inflation. 

But sure, I'm a communist because I think companies are being overly greedy in their profit taking. Lulz.

Concern over a very real wage price spiral is not the same as, "blaming inflation solely on wage increases".  The majority of posts are actually lamenting price changes in raw materials and supplies.

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4 minutes ago, Captainant said:

 

Lulz, well it's always a crapshoot if surlysearch works or not, but here's some that I've found:

And like, shit, there was a whole quarter where everyone was bigly concerned over the "fed wage price spiral". It's literally fed policy to attack wages as a means of controlling inflation. 

But sure, I'm a communist because I think companies are being overly greedy in their profit taking. Lulz.

you might not be a communist.  but you are fucking stupid.  the two are synonymous, so its just the same.

companies arent profit takers.  theyre price takers.  the profit is a consequence of the market agreement.  thats why some make money.  and others go bankrupt.

here's corporate profits dragging up price of goods.... lmao.

image.thumb.png.0fd30ebb690f63be2aa6fdd38544f80e.png

 

 

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2 minutes ago, 52-80 said:

companies arent profit takers.  theyre price takers.  the profit is a consequence of the market agreement.

My man, we do not operate in a free market environment. There are chosen winner firms that operate with the benefit of an effective monopoly and are protected from failure by the taxpayer. Firms can take as much fucking profit as they want, and then stick their hand out for a bailout and blame it on high prices. Exxon, Boeing, Mariott, you name em, they took billions in bailout money that they turned around and paid out massive exec bonuses and made biggest-ever stock buyback purchases - and then cut their labor costs and laid people off anyways. 

 

Profit is empirically NOT a consequence of the market agreement once you are sufficiently large and """too big to fail""". Sorry that you think that makes me stupid. 

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18 minutes ago, Captainant said:

And like, shit, there was a whole quarter where everyone was bigly concerned over the "fed wage price spiral". It's literally fed policy to attack wages as a means of controlling inflation. 

But sure, I'm a communist because I think companies are being overly greedy in their profit taking. Lulz.

i haven't followed this thread for a while.  too many posters unwilling to have a discussion and just flinging their talking points around. 

 

anyway those comments you quoted, including mine, don't say what you're trying to make them say.  

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37 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

Xavier Rhodes Kiss GIF by Indianapolis Colts

Did you think that was a dunk? Read the post, it was mainly right about things - inflation did look scary and it declined at about the same rate it rose, IOW, it was pretty transitory.

 

image.png.bd45621213389f8ea1120450b4e75bfd.png

I posted some other good stuff on that thread. 

 

On 4/22/2021 at 10:28 AM, Bozo_Casanova said:

For now. 

As for what tips it further, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and stay with me because I'm still thinking this through. 
I've been very critical of MMT in the past, and still am, because it represents an observational truth and nothing more - that, essentially, a monitarily sovereign country issuing its own fiat currency literally makes the money itself, that government debt is just a form of public equity in the economy, that the only real limit the government has on spending is real resources, and thus, inflation is a symptom of too much medium and not enough to exchange, which can be controlled by using taxes to take money out of circulation. 

That can be workable, because essentially you're paying everyone not to care about the money supply. But that's transitory because it only lasts as long as the government has a monopoly on issuing currency.  The rapid adoption of both public and private blockchain protocols and or basket currencies or even competing fiats as medium of exchange to facilitate transactions challenge that directly. 

IOW - I'm a lot less worried about how government spending impacts the money supply and more worried about the demand for the dollar as a reserve currency and medium of exchange, because that's the only real brake on inflation, whether MMT is correct or not*. 





*It's Bullshit, for what it's worth

 

I said "which can be controlled by taxes" above, but also this is true with rates on the other side, which is what happened. The MMT take would be that the Fed used rates to match the money supply to real economic activity.

On 4/22/2021 at 11:39 AM, Bozo_Casanova said:

I'm not defending MMT or your point, but I disagree with your premise here, which is that monetary inflation is the same thing as prices going up. It's not. 

Money isn't really a store of value, but a medium of exchange for goods and services. To be a medium of exchange it has to be durable, fungible, portable, and widely accepted for goods and services. To be widely accepted and fungible, it has to be stable enough, but not so stable that it constrains trade or productivity, which is why we've adopted fiat.  On the other hand, if it's unstable, it loses acceptability, and at that point stops being money, which is why central banks try to maintain a sweet spot of mild inflation. 

And by the way, as long as the Government is running a deficit, raising taxes isn't "taking money from people", but rather, increasing their copay on services they are receiving at well below cost, whether they value those services or not. 
 

 

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1 hour ago, Captainant said:

Just like how minimal adjustments to historically stagnant wages paid to laborers was attributed by the brain trust to be the cause of inflation. Not the historically high margins being taken by firms and record stock buybacks to enrich shareholders, of course

WTF Happened In 1971?

plenty of interesting charts available there

or here's a good one from today's Twitterzzz

 

 

 

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34 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

This near-billionaire thinks labor is getting too uppity and needs more beatings. 
 

 

Was he the one that said letting the 2003 Bush tax stimulus expire for top earners in 2010 to cut the deficit and fund a payroll tax cut would be "punishing success?" Oh, wait, no - that was @washparkhorn

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1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Did you think that was a dunk? Read the post, it was mainly right about things - inflation did look scary and it declined at about the same rate it rose, IOW, it was pretty transitory.

 

image.png.bd45621213389f8ea1120450b4e75bfd.png

I posted some other good stuff on that thread. 

 

I said "which can be controlled by taxes" above, but also this is true with rates on the other side, which is what happened. The MMT take would be that the Fed used rates to match the money supply to real economic activity.

 

You’re supposed to use an exclamation mark and a roll eye emoji when you say transitory. 

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Krugman is intentionally trolling the rubes on Elon’s message board  24BDCE53-3650-4BA8-9902-6559E0C950AF.thumb.jpeg.8a2a30f0806b801b3cc2a308583bfeb6.jpeg

And—somewhat technically—disinflation slowed last month, which indicates inflation slightly increased its pace  

tldr-disinflation is not deflation; disinflation requires increasing inflation, but at a slower pace. Krugman buried the lede to bait low information readers. Bad form by Krugman. 

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On 9/16/2023 at 1:40 PM, washparkhorn said:

Krugman is intentionally trolling the rubes on Elon’s message board  24BDCE53-3650-4BA8-9902-6559E0C950AF.thumb.jpeg.8a2a30f0806b801b3cc2a308583bfeb6.jpeg

And—somewhat technically—disinflation slowed last month, which indicates inflation slightly increased its pace  

tldr-disinflation is not deflation; disinflation requires increasing inflation, but at a slower pace. Krugman buried the lede to bait low information readers. Bad form by Krugman. 

When you don't have facts, attack your naysayers by calling them "deniers". 

This assclown is a reality denier. 

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I had to look up the difference between CPI and PCE.

PCE-Fig1.png

 

Quote

There are four main reasons for this difference:

  • Formulas: the growth in the two indices from one time period (month, quarter, year) are computed using substantively different formulas;
  • Weights: they apply different weights to their consumption categories;
  • Scope: they measure the prices of somewhat different consumer items and who purchases them;
  • Other reasons: A grab bag of other differences, including different price data for what is conceptually the same product. For example, both CPI and PCE measure the price of airfare, but CPI calculates it using a fixed basket of air routes, while PCE calculates it using data on airline passenger revenues and passenger miles traveled. Also, the two incorporate different patterns of seasonal adjustment.
Quote

PCE also weights items differently than CPI and the figure shows this difference to be more consequential, with PCE weights leading to lower measured inflation so far this year. This implies that the PCE gives less weight to prices that have been growing more quickly in the CPI over this period. Housing is an evergreen example of this difference: housing makes up 33 percent of the CPI basket but only 15 percent of PCE. In August specifically, the lower weight of gasoline prices in PCE explained about 0.1 percentage point—nearly half—of the growth in the PCE-CPI wedge between July and August.

 

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Krugman being a dishonest idiot again:

Quote

Paul Krugman was widely trolled on Thursday for saying that if you just ignore food, energy, housing, and used cars — unavoidable costs for many Americans — then the period of surging prices has passed.
...
The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist faced immediate backlash to his heavily adjusted yardstick of price growth. His X post was still at the top of the popular Wall Street Bets subreddit on Friday morning.

"A totally ridiculous measure," Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist of Bianco Research, said about Krugman's chart in an X post. "It excludes 55% of the index."
...

https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-inflation-chart-food-energy-gas-housing-prices-economy-2023-10

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4 hours ago, bernorange said:

Remember when washparkhorn told us that krugmans merely “baiting low information readers”?

IMG_3247.thumb.jpeg.b0967bfd7ce241a96d6730fdba758740.jpeg

 

also, remember when krugman said he was going to quit twitter just 6 days ago, but kept on posting since then?

IMG_3246.thumb.jpeg.083272564abe0a083fe575089a488bc1.jpeg

 

cover3.jpg
 

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