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Are there inflation indicators that aren’t government controlled? Don’t think anything coming out of trump influenced bodies is worth the paper it’s on anymore
by Havoc 1y ago
Are there inflation indicators that aren’t government controlled? Don’t think anything coming out of trump influenced bodies is worth the paper it’s on anymore
- elzbardico 1y ago[flagged]
- epistasis 1y agoHonesty would require admitting that the parties are different. They are not the same, they have different values, and we can see that by who gains and loses power in the party. Which actions are unacceptable, and which actions are rewarded. The difference is stark!
- elzbardico 1y ago[flagged]
- elzbardico 1y ago"We have no political system at all, we have a sort of corporate party with two wings, both financed by the national security state..." -Gore Vidal All the other stuff, all the heady discourses, all the piety about the downtrodden, be then the minorities from one side, or the poor rural white man from the other, it is just a fucking smoking mirror, just tools to have loyal soldiers to their cause.
- lovich 1y agoHe is just lying. His edit shows that he isn’t actually focused on both sides but is trying to muddy the waters to blame specifically democrats. He couldn’t even keep the mask on for two statements
- elzbardico 1y agoYou assume a lot my boy
- lovich 1y agoI did not, I called a spade a spade
- lentil_soup 1y ago> EDIT: The democrat brigade is busy downvoting me to deny reality. Poor children! Per the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
- jasonlotito 1y agoHN Guidelines Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
- Nicook 1y agoThere are plenty of indicators, not like its an exact science. Can trust the government one to be always under-reported, the incentive is obvious. I'm a fan of gold prices for longer periods of time.
- abtinf 1y agoGold. The purchasing power of Gold has been remarkably consistent over the long term. That is, if you convert the gold to dollars, how many eggs could you buy? To learn more, read up on the work of Keith Weiner of Monetary Metals, or listen to the early episodes of his podcast “The Gold Exchange”.
- Workaccount2 1y agoThe problem with gold is that it's price fluctuates just like any other commodity. The practical uses of gold accounts for only ~8% of gold mined, while half is for vanity (jewelry, a luxury product) and the rest for speculation and reserves. Similar to fiat, most of the value in gold is in people believing it has value.
- rsynnott 1y ago> Similar to fiat, most of the value in gold is in people believing it has value. Much moreso, really, because the value of money is kinda sticky; it's really difficult for it to change _quickly_ because a lot of stuff is essentially priced months or years in advance. Even the pretty dramatic inflation in developed world countries in '21-'23 would not be particularly exciting price action for gold, which really can swing quite dramatically in a short period of time.
- jjk166 1y agoThat's exactly why gold is a useful proxy. The price of gold is pretty much purely a function of how much money speculators have in their pockets. If inflation is high, it means there are more dollars that can go into gold speculation, driving up the nominal cost of gold. If the cost of gold is going down, it means the dollar is strong by comparison. If you used a proxy that had a significant utility in its own right, like say oil or steel, the price would be a function of how efficiently it can be produced and how strong the economy at large is to demand its consumption.
- wqaatwt 1y agoI assume you never tried looking at the price of gold in the 80s and 90s? i.e. it declined in nominal rates and collapsed by almost 4x if adjusted by CPI
- duxup 1y agoNothing as complete or reliable (historically speaking) as the government numbers. Truth is they're just the best at doing it, or were.
- tim333 1y agoI asked perplexity and there are a few independent calculations (ShadowStats, Truflation, Billion Prices) that put the rate at about 10% https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-us-inflation-rate-67qdUbKJSCWg_CGTKAxdWA#0 https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-us-inflation-ra...
- throw0101a 1y ago> ShadowStats Just no: > Responding to prior criticisms made by economist James Hamilton, John Williams explained in a private phone call that Shadowstats does not actually recalculate BLS data, rather, the Shadowstats CPI merely adds a constant to the officially reported numbers.[28] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com#Negative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowstats.com#Negative SHADOWSTATS(t) = 1.9 + 0.0055*t + CPIAUCNS(t) * https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/3zik5t/shadowstatscom/ https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/3zik5t/shadow... * https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-rate-isnt-14-percent https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r... > Truflation * https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1beg6db/how_reliable_is_truflation_and_are_there_any_real/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1beg6db/how_r... > Billion Prices They actually published code so other folks could recreate: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
- the_real_cher 1y agoWe're losing 10% of our money annually. That's absolutely insane.
- Analemma_ 1y agoIf you actually stop and think about it for a couple seconds, you should realize immediately that a “secret” inflation rate of 10% is impossible. You can lie about that for a month or two, but 10% annual inflation means prices double every 7 years, which is obviously not what we observe.
- CamperBob2 1y agoIt may not be what you observe, but frankly, prices doubling at a 7-year rate sounds a lot like what's actually happening.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoWhat you really need to understand about inflation, is that we've had particularly exceptionally low long-term inflation in America for the last 50 years, outside of stagflation in the '70s. And this is all enabled by globalization and global trade. Globalization fundamentally provides arbitrage for two things. Labor costs, and environmental regulation. Because there were a lot of poor desperate countries that would build your stuff for near slave labor conditions. In particular, China of course. But China has now passed through its phase of poor desperation. It is now an urbanized economy. So of a lot of other poor desperate countries aren't quite as poor desperate. Globalization is fundamentally enabled by the US Navy and US military supremacy guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans. This has not been the historical Norm. It's actually historical anomaly caused by the power vacuum of world war II, and secondarily by the fact that the Cold war was between the US and maritime power and Russia, who are effectively landlocked. Some scholars term China as a continental power, especially cuz of their history of invasion like the Mongols, but unlike Russia, China has a very large coastline with a lot of ports that aren't locked in by Arctic ice. They are a hybrid Continental and a maritime power, and based on their shipbuilding, their ambitions are to become a maritime power. This combined with American lack of enthusiasm for maintaining this global order, likely means that globalization will come to an end. And that means onshoring production back from China. We'll see if this actually happens, but that is the trend long-term. And that involves a huge amount of switching costs, which essentially is going to be inflation. I'm certainly not going to sit here and say that Trump's economic policies are correct. Of course, the proper way to handle a transition of reonshoring our production from our previous 50 years of globalization would be gradual and controlled. Not a bunch of stupid chaotic tariff policies. But essentially what Trump is doing is in line with everything I've described.
- judahmeek 1y ago> But essentially what Trump is doing is in line with everything I've described. No. Trump's tariffs are too unfocused to accomplish any goal besides increasing American inflation from what I've read. Trump's tariffs on raw materials, metals, etc make no sense whatsoever. Motivating the creation of new mines or refining facilities should have been done through subsidies, possibly combined with promise of future tariffs. And, obviously, Trump's tariffs on raw materials raise the cost of construction & composite products, which will likely push manufacturing out of the U.S.
- throw0101a 1y ago> Are there inflation indicators that aren’t government controlled? There have been research programs that collected the data themselves: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
- htrp 1y agowhich became a hedge fund data provider
- tmaly 1y agoI don't trust any government numbers regardless of who the president is. There will always be pressure to fudge the numbers to make who ever is running things look good. There use to be a billion prices project out of MIT that got shutdown years ago because it show higher inflation than what the rulers at the Fed wanted to show. I believe its funding was pulled or something like that.
- qzw 1y agoWhat’s crazy is that of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about. It’s something that consumers can more or less directly observe, so having an official number that’s much below people’s “wallet meter” is doing nothing but erode trust in government. In fact, given that a steady inflation rate actually leads to bigger and bigger price increases, most people are going to feel worse about it at a visceral level. If the government wanted to build credibility with the public, they’d come up with a metric that better aligns with people’s actual economic situations. But then that might lead to people demanding higher wages, so I guess it’s a nonstarter in America.
- gottorf 1y ago> of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about. A lot of government liabilities are tied to CPI, so there's a strong incentive on the part of the government to under-report inflation.
- deeg 1y agoDo you have any evidence it was shut down by the Fed? I looked briefly at the BPP numbers and they aren't that far off the CPI. There were even a few times it was lower than the CPI. There was a 2 year period that BPP was noticeably higher but it eventually converged. https://thebillionpricesproject.com/datasets/ https://thebillionpricesproject.com/datasets/