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The real problem is the labor market. With boomers retiring and deaths and disability due to covid taking workers out of the pool, along with suppression of im

The real problem is the labor market. With boomers retiring and deaths and disability due to covid taking workers out of the pool, along with suppression of immigration, there's a large overhang of jobs compared to workers. This is giving average workers negotiating power which is creating wage growth. That is what the Fed and the business pages are really most concerned about and the sternest warnings from the Fed are about the labor market. Not the headline CPI numbers. The fact that the "man on the street" now believes that inflation is purely a monetary phenomenon, though, means that every time wage inflation rears its head that people will clamor for the Fed to punish the economy. The Fed is going to have to crash the economy to create a recession and thereby cause deflation. There will almost certainly be detonations elsewhere in the economy (commercial and residential real estate most likely) that will further cause deflation. High CPI will be transitory because this Fed doesn't care about tanking the economy. Billionaires also don't care about tanking the economy, the past 20 years have taught them they always wind up even more on top than before. What will be interesting though is to see what happens when they've had enough of pain and start to support the economy again, then inflation will probably come roaring back, since its causes are now the structural conditions of the wage market. Then there will be renewed calls to tank the economy again and people will object to the Fed doing anything to try to support the economy with exactly the same rhetoric here. In the near term future (~10 years) any time the inflation numbers tick up the stock market may crash on its own now. I suspect we're now in for a decade or more of stagnation, although alternating periods of inflation and recession should average out. I might be wrong though if the billionaires decide it is too painful and want the Fed to turn the money spigot back on. But as a lot of this comment section shows, the managerial class has now been taught to really deeply hate the Fed doing that, and believes it to be the root cause of all that is ill.

namelessoracle 4y ago
I suspect the massive money printing going on for years has had no impact because most of that money never actually landed in the hands of actual people and just existed to be sucked up by wall street and elites. And they dont spend in a way to impact prices. But enter covid money printing actually reaching normal people (even if alot of it got soaked up too), plus the elites using the money to buy things normal people want instead of rich people nonsense (buying housing as "safe" investment during covid), plus all the money that was going towards servicing student loans getting spend in the economy, plus normal people using their power to get more wages due to worker shortages and here we are.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  I think it is more that the earlier money printing addressed more normal, slow moving business cycle issues, and so slowly backing off of it worked exactly as planned. With COVID, the money printing was addressing a fast moving and fast correcting temporary effect of organic and top-down behavior changes in the early part of the pandemic, which snapped back hard with general reopening, meaning the normal pace of unwinding fiscal and monetary stimulus was too slow to prevent the measures meant to prevent catastrophic depression and deflation combining with the rapid economic rebound to produce inflation (there’s some pieces that didn’t rebound which actually exacerbated the inflation effect, e.g., supply chain capacity.)
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > I suspect the massive money printing going on for years has had no impact because most of that money never actually landed in the hands of actual people and just existed to be sucked up by wall street and elites. And they dont spend in a way to impact prices. Yes. I think we had something like monetary inflation but it was all captured by the upper 1% and 0.1%. The policies suppressed wages down the Ginni Coefficient ladder and actually contained inflation. This produced low interest rates due to low CPI inflation expectations. But it would up producing what economists call asset bubbles rather than inflation. This has also built up over the past 30-40 years ever since Volker in 1980, it goes way beyond the post-2008 recovery and the pandemic. We're now seeing the point where this has all become unsustainable, and the masses are clamoring (rightly) to get a share of it. Either we're going to allow that inflation to run downhill now and re-price via inflating wages and suck up the smaller pain of inflation, or I think we're going to have to inflict truly severe economic pain of multiple deep recessions. Given how much people now deeply hate inflation, now that wage inflation has reached the baristas and food service people, it looks like we're going to choose recession.
- sbarbarian 4y ago
  Another element here is that a lot of that "money printing" went overseas. Agree with what you say, this time it was all sent domestically as part of stimulus checks.

namelessoracle 4y ago

I suspect the massive money printing going on for years has had no impact because most of that money never actually landed in the hands of actual people and just existed to be sucked up by wall street and elites. And they dont spend in a way to impact prices. But enter covid money printing actually reaching normal people (even if alot of it got soaked up too), plus the elites using the money to buy things normal people want instead of rich people nonsense (buying housing as "safe" investment during covid), plus all the money that was going towards servicing student loans getting spend in the economy, plus normal people using their power to get more wages due to worker shortages and here we are.

dragonwriter 4y ago
I think it is more that the earlier money printing addressed more normal, slow moving business cycle issues, and so slowly backing off of it worked exactly as planned. With COVID, the money printing was addressing a fast moving and fast correcting temporary effect of organic and top-down behavior changes in the early part of the pandemic, which snapped back hard with general reopening, meaning the normal pace of unwinding fiscal and monetary stimulus was too slow to prevent the measures meant to prevent catastrophic depression and deflation combining with the rapid economic rebound to produce inflation (there’s some pieces that didn’t rebound which actually exacerbated the inflation effect, e.g., supply chain capacity.)
lamontcg 4y ago
> I suspect the massive money printing going on for years has had no impact because most of that money never actually landed in the hands of actual people and just existed to be sucked up by wall street and elites. And they dont spend in a way to impact prices. Yes. I think we had something like monetary inflation but it was all captured by the upper 1% and 0.1%. The policies suppressed wages down the Ginni Coefficient ladder and actually contained inflation. This produced low interest rates due to low CPI inflation expectations. But it would up producing what economists call asset bubbles rather than inflation. This has also built up over the past 30-40 years ever since Volker in 1980, it goes way beyond the post-2008 recovery and the pandemic. We're now seeing the point where this has all become unsustainable, and the masses are clamoring (rightly) to get a share of it. Either we're going to allow that inflation to run downhill now and re-price via inflating wages and suck up the smaller pain of inflation, or I think we're going to have to inflict truly severe economic pain of multiple deep recessions. Given how much people now deeply hate inflation, now that wage inflation has reached the baristas and food service people, it looks like we're going to choose recession.
sbarbarian 4y ago
Another element here is that a lot of that "money printing" went overseas. Agree with what you say, this time it was all sent domestically as part of stimulus checks.