7 ms·

Today no one seems to care about inflation in Europe or in the US. It seems to be a subject confined to economists that every day people don’t care about, if th

by cm2187 5y ago

Today no one seems to care about inflation in Europe or in the US. It seems to be a subject confined to economists that every day people don’t care about, if they even understand the concept (no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life). So people are all for unlimited money printing. It is interesting to find old articles and read what people cared about at the time. Inflation was often a top concern, and politicians running their campaign on curbing it. Some old movies also refer to it (that stolen money which will melts away while you await behind bars). Our current complacency in term of budget deficits and monetary policy will wake up that sleeping dragon.

sanp 5y ago
Perhaps inflation was a concern in an economic system where 1) A physical commodity (Gold) was the store of value, and 2) Debt was not easily accessible. Neither of these are true anymore and inflation now will be a reflection of true scarcity of a good / service (e.g., housing) as opposed to the transaction costs associated with procuring it...
- bequanna 5y ago
  The familiar refrain of hubris the has preceded pretty much every crisis: “This time is different.”
- leppr 5y ago
  Access to debt is still difficult for those that will be hurt most by inflation of consumption goods (CPI in the US). Furthermore it's also more accessible proportionally to existing wealth, which means inflation is in effect an inequality amplifier.
carnitine 5y ago
Probably because inflation has never been particularly bad post-QE. We had inflation north of 10% in the 70s, it’s averaged a couple of percent in the last two decades. Also, despite what the Fed probably wants you to think, QE is not money printing, it is a duration swap between different forms of existing money.
- bhouser 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by a “duration swap” and “different forms of money”?
  - carnitine 5y ago
    When the Fed does quantitative easing, they swap bank reserves for bonds held by banks. These bonds are economically equivalent to money which cannot be spent until a certain date, so the Fed is effectively just bringing this date forward.
    - pgwhalen 5y ago
      It sounds like you subscribe to the increasingly popular framing of money creation, which is that the fed does not create money, the treasury does. Much of my knowledge on the matter comes from fedguy.com.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        You see, you can't pay rent or buy groceries with bank reserves but they sure do make it easier for banks to lend money. Someone has to borrow money before it can be spent. I would also like to mention that the fiscal stimulus by the Biden administration had the intended/usual effect. You know, the thing that QE couldn't create: inflation. If there is an effective tool then the defective tool that distorts the economy can be thrown away.
    - arminiusreturns 5y ago
      ...and where do those bank reserves originate from?
otterley 5y ago
The Federal Reserve System cares very much about inflation and reports on it in every single FOMC meeting. You can read their meeting minutes at https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars....
Spooky23 5y ago
Why would normal people? Most folks are in mortgage and consumer debt and have little wealth. Higher inflation mostly impacts people with wealth. Look at what’s happening now. Lower income folks are getting life changing payments of just a few thousand dollars in the US that is causing increase in services costs.
- toastermoster 5y ago
  Wealthy people own assets that keep up with inflation. They may have 10% in cash which doesn’t keep up with inflation but in general most of their holdings either keep up or outperform inflation. Poor people have wages that don’t keep up with inflation unless they start job hopping. The poor are typically more affected by inflation than the rich.
- toastermoster 5y ago
  Those who have borrowed money benefit from inflation though. If you have student loans or a mortgage, high inflation can work to effectively reduce how much you owe if salaries/wages go up with inflation.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Exactly. This is how the student debt process gets resolved.
  - jbay808 5y ago
    Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For example, inflation typically triggers interest rate increases. If your debt is fixed rate that's fine, but if it's not, it might get more expensive more quickly than you expected, and your wage increase might not cover it.
jbay808 5y ago
I've been thinking about this topic more and more, and the more I study it, the more I realize how incredibly rich of a subject it is. For example, I used to assume that monetary inflation was instant and automatic. Double the money supply overnight, and everyone will double their prices and incomes overnight too, as though all that happened was a substitution of variables. Later I understood that it's not that simple. First, the new money doesn't get distribution in proportion to how much people own, so savings get halved. Second, contracts denoted in dollars don't get adjusted, so debts and purchase orders get cheaper, accounts receivable become worth less, and so on. And lastly, prices aren't updated automatically by some perfectly objective value calculation. They're held in place by a combination of supply and demand, competitive forces, price elasticity, psychology, and collective expectations. So the inflation can apply instantly in some markets but it can also take years for those changes to propagate into various other markets. And even once the money supply stops increasing, inflation can keep going all on its own accord, once expectations become fixed. This happened in Japan in the '60s and '70s where unions demanded 5% annual wage increases to keep up with the inflation caused by every industry getting 5% annual price increases caused by union wage increases... Right now it seems like the new money is going straight into asset prices, and that will probably remain the case until either asset holders start selling their assets to consume an absurd amount of food and gasoline, or the high price of assets starts to weigh heavily on the cost of production.
- hiram112 5y ago
  > This happened in Japan in the '60s and '70s where unions demanded 5% annual wage increases to keep up with the inflation caused by every industry getting 5% annual price increases caused by union wage increases... As a gov contractor, I'm seeing this first-hand. Inflation has been tame my whole career in this industry - 2% or 3% / year; therefore, contracts of fixed length have built-in rate increases of similar percentages, and raises trickle down from there. Most companies will give you raises a bit less than what they're getting each year in increased rates themselves - it's how they increase their own growth and executive bonuses. This can go on for a long time - 5-10 years before the employee will really notice they're falling behind peers who've just been hired or general market rates if they were to jump shit. But when real inflation is running 7%-10%, the wage disparities between new hires & contracts and existing employees & contracts become evident quickly. For example, I'm discovering that new engineers with far less experience and talent are being hired on for $20K - $40K more than I make, all else equal. Which forces me to start looking for new employment or ask management for a raise, neither of which is desirable.
iso1210 5y ago
Many people under 50 don't care about inflation because they owe money, they certainly don't have money - it's all be taken by rent seekers. Then all that nonsense about lumber earlier in the year, blaming QE for supply problems. Lumber prices now 1/3rd what they were a few months ago.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Usually people care about inflation in the context of cost of living vs their earnings, not their net assets.
Swizec 5y ago
> (no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life) Akhem, there are places outside America. I still have the postage stamps for 100,000 monetary units from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Yugoslavia in my mom’s basement somewhere. My parents’ tales of ridiculous mass inflation have been etched into my brain. I was too young to remember, but the spectre loomed large. Especially in the mid 1990’s when the rest of Yugoslavia set the world record for monthly inflation that still stands today. Luckily we were our own country with our own money by then. At one point hyperinflation reached 2% per hour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Yugoslavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Yugoslavia I believe many parts of South America are going through high levels of inflation right now.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Zimbabwe could have implemented a land value tax on farmland to achieve its goals to undo colonization, instead they violently drove farmers away and then they could no longer feed themselves. Zimbabwe was just another victim of Marxism, to be more precise anti colonial Marxism. Imagine if the president of the USA decided to solve the homeless problem of the black population by pointing guns at white homeowners and forcibly dragging them out of town. It's clearly unsustainable. There might be truly disgusting capitalists like martin shkreli on this planet but they don't attack you directly, they merely deny you your fair share of the wealth you have created.
  - rbinv 5y ago
    > Zimbabwe was just another victim of Marxism, to be more precise anti colonial Marxism. What's the difference between Marxism and "anti-colonial Marxism"?
x3sphere 5y ago
People don't care about inflation specifically, but they do care about how it is affecting them. For example, lots of people seem worried about getting priced out of buying a home these days, which inflation has certainly contributed to in a big way.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Its cheap credit that drives up home prices. Historically low interest rates are driving historically high home values. We are currently in some kind of home price bubble which will change when interest rates change. Zillow and recent sales say the value of my home is up 20% in 9 months. Last year a dozen donuts at the local family run shop was $9, this year it is $12. My daughter's specialist doctor raised the cost of an office visit by 30% this year. The cost of a burrito at my favorite spot is up 25% in two years. I could go on. I care about inflation, and it is real.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    People can afford those absurd home prices. The bigger problem is that the previous owner of the land gets to extract a huge chunk of your labor by simply by owning the land.
    - annoyingnoob 5y ago
      https://www.thetruthaboutmortgage.com/use-this-mortgage-payment-chart-to-easily-compare-rates/ https://www.thetruthaboutmortgage.com/use-this-mortgage-paym... Lower rates mean a lower payment, maybe affording the ability to outbid someone for a home you want. When rates go up buyers have higher payments. The existing owner will have to pay taxes on the profits or reinvest in the same crazy market (perhaps losing a tax advantage).
      - leppr 5y ago
        Value is still shifting somewhere. Lower rates can force you to borrow more total value to outbid your peers, allowing the bank to extract the same or more value out of you. Same with taxes entering the equation. I don't reckon any monetary distortions benefit the common people. Society benefits from money being a reflection of labor as much as possible. Everything else is extraction of value.
anonuser123456 5y ago
I don't think inflation is a problem at all; the Fed clearly has tools to keep inflation low. Now... doing so might totally ruin the economy and eat all GDP growth, but that's the next generations problem.
leppr 5y ago
Well, while the printing machines were running, the zeitgeist was fully occupied with Covid-19, BLM, a short episode of anti-Asian racism toward the end, Trump's vulgar attitude, ... Now that the harm is done and the money circulating, the media is slowly starting to shine some light on the topic. Although that could push one toward conspiracy theories, as per Hanlon's razor we shall not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. The media probably just got distracted as we all were.
perl4ever 5y ago
>no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life I had a car loan in the early 21st century, and the rate was about 6%. It didn't seem that bad at the time. I think I remember when the bank paid 4% on savings accounts in the 80s or 90s. That's not to say inflation was very high in my lifetime, but it took a long time for people to get really complacent that it wasn't coming back, and super low (or negative) interest rates are quite recent. It's only been about 40 years since 30-year mortgage rates were over 18%. Someone in their 40s may not remember it first hand, but they probably have a sense from the older generation that is a thing that happened.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I am very concerned about inflation. I wish the fed would raise interest rates. These low rates only seem to help the wealthy, and prop up an overvalued stock market. While the wealthy see their stocks skyrocketing, the poor and middle class just see higher living costs. I guess if you can afford a house the low interest rates are nice? In the 90's I used to get $400 a year on my sweaty cd wad. (I can't afford to gamble with stocks.) The other day I took out a few thousand from my cd, and was concerned about the early withdrawal which is tied to current interest accumulation. The fee was 49 cents. Personally, I feel the reason the fed tax rate is so low is because Powell knows this stock market is truly a house of cards. Most business are way overvalued. He's scared to death it will crash on a scale that won't be as bad as '29, but the wealthy will lose most of their cash. I have never seen a bull market go on for this long. Almost in every other I have watched the professional stock boys wait until the last retail investor put in his last dime, and they pull all their money out. I felt it was doing to implode a few moths ago with all the NFT's, and glamour puss celebrity SPAC's being pimped, but no. I feel if that hastily put together, nebulous, pork filled 2700 pages, infrastructure bill, which seems like it will basically be a gift to contractors (like Ghilotti Family syndicate types). It will produce very few union blue collar jobs that will not last. If it does pass we might not see a big stock market crash for a bit longer, but it's coming. Instead of the Infrastructure bill, I would rather see a Basic Income. Poor people who didn't work got nothing out of the pandemic money. Homeless got nothing out of the handout. Let's do the infrastructure spending when we have a clue to where the money is going? Ok--to those who can't afford to lose money, get your money out of those overvalued stocks. The crash is coming. (Sorry about the rant. I have watched the stock market decimate the little guys over the years. The wealthy slowly pull out, but the retail investor gets whacked.)
- andrekandre 5y ago
  > I wish the fed would raise interest rates ... > The crash is coming. i have heard it said raising interest rates would actually be the instigator of a huge crunch/crash reason being that for the last 10 years or so, companies all over have been soaking up "cheap" capital from what is basically basically zero interest loans these debts are what is keeping those companies floating/alive, and if rates were increased even a bit, it could be devastating by causing a quick succession of bankruptcies (supposedly this was why trump was so angry at the fed for pondering raising the rate) anyways, im not an expert, but it seemed plausible...
toast0 5y ago
> no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life The inflation rates aren't too bad, but $10k can't get you a (very lowend) new car anymore, like it did when I graduated. Speaking of graduation, looking ahead to college prices for my kid, sticker prices are easily the price of a whole 4 year degree when I went for every year. If we include my childhood, arcade games used to be a quarter; the last arcade I was in, even Pac-Man was 50 cents, let alone the dollar or two dollar games that were more modern.
dood 5y ago
We've been in a deflationary cycle (driven by technology & globalisation) for decades, so inflation hasn't been so relevant. With that cycle now concluding it's likely that inflation concerns will soon be making a major comeback, already some observable echos of the stagflationary 70's: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/18/archives/how-carter-can-stop-inflation-inflation.html https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/18/archives/how-carter-can-s...
unionpivo 5y ago
Maybe in the west, but us from ex Yugoslavia and other comunist/socailist(the bad kind) countries, do care about inflation. And I suspect economists are manipulating how they calculate inflation, since I am creature of habit and mostly buy and consume same things for the past 15 years. Prices are going up significantly. Some of it might be due to global shipping increase, but over all my total spending on consumables has increased to between 15% and 20% in the past 2 years.

by cm2187 5y ago

sanp 5y ago

Perhaps inflation was a concern in an economic system where 1) A physical commodity (Gold) was the store of value, and 2) Debt was not easily accessible. Neither of these are true anymore and inflation now will be a reflection of true scarcity of a good / service (e.g., housing) as opposed to the transaction costs associated with procuring it...

bequanna 5y ago
The familiar refrain of hubris the has preceded pretty much every crisis: “This time is different.”
leppr 5y ago
Access to debt is still difficult for those that will be hurt most by inflation of consumption goods (CPI in the US). Furthermore it's also more accessible proportionally to existing wealth, which means inflation is in effect an inequality amplifier.

carnitine 5y ago

Probably because inflation has never been particularly bad post-QE. We had inflation north of 10% in the 70s, it’s averaged a couple of percent in the last two decades. Also, despite what the Fed probably wants you to think, QE is not money printing, it is a duration swap between different forms of existing money.

bhouser 5y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by a “duration swap” and “different forms of money”?
- carnitine 5y ago
  When the Fed does quantitative easing, they swap bank reserves for bonds held by banks. These bonds are economically equivalent to money which cannot be spent until a certain date, so the Fed is effectively just bringing this date forward.
  - pgwhalen 5y ago
    It sounds like you subscribe to the increasingly popular framing of money creation, which is that the fed does not create money, the treasury does. Much of my knowledge on the matter comes from fedguy.com.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      You see, you can't pay rent or buy groceries with bank reserves but they sure do make it easier for banks to lend money. Someone has to borrow money before it can be spent. I would also like to mention that the fiscal stimulus by the Biden administration had the intended/usual effect. You know, the thing that QE couldn't create: inflation. If there is an effective tool then the defective tool that distorts the economy can be thrown away.
  - arminiusreturns 5y ago
    ...and where do those bank reserves originate from?

otterley 5y ago

The Federal Reserve System cares very much about inflation and reports on it in every single FOMC meeting. You can read their meeting minutes at https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomccalendars....

Spooky23 5y ago

Why would normal people? Most folks are in mortgage and consumer debt and have little wealth. Higher inflation mostly impacts people with wealth. Look at what’s happening now. Lower income folks are getting life changing payments of just a few thousand dollars in the US that is causing increase in services costs.

toastermoster 5y ago
Wealthy people own assets that keep up with inflation. They may have 10% in cash which doesn’t keep up with inflation but in general most of their holdings either keep up or outperform inflation. Poor people have wages that don’t keep up with inflation unless they start job hopping. The poor are typically more affected by inflation than the rich.
toastermoster 5y ago
Those who have borrowed money benefit from inflation though. If you have student loans or a mortgage, high inflation can work to effectively reduce how much you owe if salaries/wages go up with inflation.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Exactly. This is how the student debt process gets resolved.
- jbay808 5y ago
  Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For example, inflation typically triggers interest rate increases. If your debt is fixed rate that's fine, but if it's not, it might get more expensive more quickly than you expected, and your wage increase might not cover it.

jbay808 5y ago

I've been thinking about this topic more and more, and the more I study it, the more I realize how incredibly rich of a subject it is. For example, I used to assume that monetary inflation was instant and automatic. Double the money supply overnight, and everyone will double their prices and incomes overnight too, as though all that happened was a substitution of variables. Later I understood that it's not that simple. First, the new money doesn't get distribution in proportion to how much people own, so savings get halved. Second, contracts denoted in dollars don't get adjusted, so debts and purchase orders get cheaper, accounts receivable become worth less, and so on. And lastly, prices aren't updated automatically by some perfectly objective value calculation. They're held in place by a combination of supply and demand, competitive forces, price elasticity, psychology, and collective expectations. So the inflation can apply instantly in some markets but it can also take years for those changes to propagate into various other markets. And even once the money supply stops increasing, inflation can keep going all on its own accord, once expectations become fixed. This happened in Japan in the '60s and '70s where unions demanded 5% annual wage increases to keep up with the inflation caused by every industry getting 5% annual price increases caused by union wage increases... Right now it seems like the new money is going straight into asset prices, and that will probably remain the case until either asset holders start selling their assets to consume an absurd amount of food and gasoline, or the high price of assets starts to weigh heavily on the cost of production.

hiram112 5y ago
> This happened in Japan in the '60s and '70s where unions demanded 5% annual wage increases to keep up with the inflation caused by every industry getting 5% annual price increases caused by union wage increases... As a gov contractor, I'm seeing this first-hand. Inflation has been tame my whole career in this industry - 2% or 3% / year; therefore, contracts of fixed length have built-in rate increases of similar percentages, and raises trickle down from there. Most companies will give you raises a bit less than what they're getting each year in increased rates themselves - it's how they increase their own growth and executive bonuses. This can go on for a long time - 5-10 years before the employee will really notice they're falling behind peers who've just been hired or general market rates if they were to jump shit. But when real inflation is running 7%-10%, the wage disparities between new hires & contracts and existing employees & contracts become evident quickly. For example, I'm discovering that new engineers with far less experience and talent are being hired on for $20K - $40K more than I make, all else equal. Which forces me to start looking for new employment or ask management for a raise, neither of which is desirable.

iso1210 5y ago

Many people under 50 don't care about inflation because they owe money, they certainly don't have money - it's all be taken by rent seekers. Then all that nonsense about lumber earlier in the year, blaming QE for supply problems. Lumber prices now 1/3rd what they were a few months ago.

cm2187 5y ago
Usually people care about inflation in the context of cost of living vs their earnings, not their net assets.

Swizec 5y ago

> (no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life) Akhem, there are places outside America. I still have the postage stamps for 100,000 monetary units from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Yugoslavia in my mom’s basement somewhere. My parents’ tales of ridiculous mass inflation have been etched into my brain. I was too young to remember, but the spectre loomed large. Especially in the mid 1990’s when the rest of Yugoslavia set the world record for monthly inflation that still stands today. Luckily we were our own country with our own money by then. At one point hyperinflation reached 2% per hour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Yugoslavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Yugoslavia I believe many parts of South America are going through high levels of inflation right now.

imtringued 5y ago
Zimbabwe could have implemented a land value tax on farmland to achieve its goals to undo colonization, instead they violently drove farmers away and then they could no longer feed themselves. Zimbabwe was just another victim of Marxism, to be more precise anti colonial Marxism. Imagine if the president of the USA decided to solve the homeless problem of the black population by pointing guns at white homeowners and forcibly dragging them out of town. It's clearly unsustainable. There might be truly disgusting capitalists like martin shkreli on this planet but they don't attack you directly, they merely deny you your fair share of the wealth you have created.
- rbinv 5y ago
  > Zimbabwe was just another victim of Marxism, to be more precise anti colonial Marxism. What's the difference between Marxism and "anti-colonial Marxism"?

x3sphere 5y ago

People don't care about inflation specifically, but they do care about how it is affecting them. For example, lots of people seem worried about getting priced out of buying a home these days, which inflation has certainly contributed to in a big way.

annoyingnoob 5y ago
Its cheap credit that drives up home prices. Historically low interest rates are driving historically high home values. We are currently in some kind of home price bubble which will change when interest rates change. Zillow and recent sales say the value of my home is up 20% in 9 months. Last year a dozen donuts at the local family run shop was $9, this year it is $12. My daughter's specialist doctor raised the cost of an office visit by 30% this year. The cost of a burrito at my favorite spot is up 25% in two years. I could go on. I care about inflation, and it is real.
- imtringued 5y ago
  People can afford those absurd home prices. The bigger problem is that the previous owner of the land gets to extract a huge chunk of your labor by simply by owning the land.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    https://www.thetruthaboutmortgage.com/use-this-mortgage-payment-chart-to-easily-compare-rates/ https://www.thetruthaboutmortgage.com/use-this-mortgage-paym... Lower rates mean a lower payment, maybe affording the ability to outbid someone for a home you want. When rates go up buyers have higher payments. The existing owner will have to pay taxes on the profits or reinvest in the same crazy market (perhaps losing a tax advantage).
    - leppr 5y ago
      Value is still shifting somewhere. Lower rates can force you to borrow more total value to outbid your peers, allowing the bank to extract the same or more value out of you. Same with taxes entering the equation. I don't reckon any monetary distortions benefit the common people. Society benefits from money being a reflection of labor as much as possible. Everything else is extraction of value.

anonuser123456 5y ago

I don't think inflation is a problem at all; the Fed clearly has tools to keep inflation low. Now... doing so might totally ruin the economy and eat all GDP growth, but that's the next generations problem.

leppr 5y ago

Well, while the printing machines were running, the zeitgeist was fully occupied with Covid-19, BLM, a short episode of anti-Asian racism toward the end, Trump's vulgar attitude, ... Now that the harm is done and the money circulating, the media is slowly starting to shine some light on the topic. Although that could push one toward conspiracy theories, as per Hanlon's razor we shall not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. The media probably just got distracted as we all were.

perl4ever 5y ago

>no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life I had a car loan in the early 21st century, and the rate was about 6%. It didn't seem that bad at the time. I think I remember when the bank paid 4% on savings accounts in the 80s or 90s. That's not to say inflation was very high in my lifetime, but it took a long time for people to get really complacent that it wasn't coming back, and super low (or negative) interest rates are quite recent. It's only been about 40 years since 30-year mortgage rates were over 18%. Someone in their 40s may not remember it first hand, but they probably have a sense from the older generation that is a thing that happened.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I am very concerned about inflation. I wish the fed would raise interest rates. These low rates only seem to help the wealthy, and prop up an overvalued stock market. While the wealthy see their stocks skyrocketing, the poor and middle class just see higher living costs. I guess if you can afford a house the low interest rates are nice? In the 90's I used to get $400 a year on my sweaty cd wad. (I can't afford to gamble with stocks.) The other day I took out a few thousand from my cd, and was concerned about the early withdrawal which is tied to current interest accumulation. The fee was 49 cents. Personally, I feel the reason the fed tax rate is so low is because Powell knows this stock market is truly a house of cards. Most business are way overvalued. He's scared to death it will crash on a scale that won't be as bad as '29, but the wealthy will lose most of their cash. I have never seen a bull market go on for this long. Almost in every other I have watched the professional stock boys wait until the last retail investor put in his last dime, and they pull all their money out. I felt it was doing to implode a few moths ago with all the NFT's, and glamour puss celebrity SPAC's being pimped, but no. I feel if that hastily put together, nebulous, pork filled 2700 pages, infrastructure bill, which seems like it will basically be a gift to contractors (like Ghilotti Family syndicate types). It will produce very few union blue collar jobs that will not last. If it does pass we might not see a big stock market crash for a bit longer, but it's coming. Instead of the Infrastructure bill, I would rather see a Basic Income. Poor people who didn't work got nothing out of the pandemic money. Homeless got nothing out of the handout. Let's do the infrastructure spending when we have a clue to where the money is going? Ok--to those who can't afford to lose money, get your money out of those overvalued stocks. The crash is coming. (Sorry about the rant. I have watched the stock market decimate the little guys over the years. The wealthy slowly pull out, but the retail investor gets whacked.)

andrekandre 5y ago
> I wish the fed would raise interest rates ... > The crash is coming. i have heard it said raising interest rates would actually be the instigator of a huge crunch/crash reason being that for the last 10 years or so, companies all over have been soaking up "cheap" capital from what is basically basically zero interest loans these debts are what is keeping those companies floating/alive, and if rates were increased even a bit, it could be devastating by causing a quick succession of bankruptcies (supposedly this was why trump was so angry at the fed for pondering raising the rate) anyways, im not an expert, but it seemed plausible...

toast0 5y ago

> no one under 50 has really witnessed it in their adult life The inflation rates aren't too bad, but $10k can't get you a (very lowend) new car anymore, like it did when I graduated. Speaking of graduation, looking ahead to college prices for my kid, sticker prices are easily the price of a whole 4 year degree when I went for every year. If we include my childhood, arcade games used to be a quarter; the last arcade I was in, even Pac-Man was 50 cents, let alone the dollar or two dollar games that were more modern.

dood 5y ago

We've been in a deflationary cycle (driven by technology & globalisation) for decades, so inflation hasn't been so relevant. With that cycle now concluding it's likely that inflation concerns will soon be making a major comeback, already some observable echos of the stagflationary 70's: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/18/archives/how-carter-can-stop-inflation-inflation.html https://www.nytimes.com/1978/06/18/archives/how-carter-can-s...

unionpivo 5y ago

Maybe in the west, but us from ex Yugoslavia and other comunist/socailist(the bad kind) countries, do care about inflation. And I suspect economists are manipulating how they calculate inflation, since I am creature of habit and mostly buy and consume same things for the past 15 years. Prices are going up significantly. Some of it might be due to global shipping increase, but over all my total spending on consumables has increased to between 15% and 20% in the past 2 years.