https://inflationchart.com/cpi-in-bigmac
https://inflationchart.com/spx-in-bigmac
In the 70s you could work minimum wage for an hour and afford three Big Macs. Now you have to work almost an hour to afford one Big Mac.:
> "You're now losing -1% of your money to inflation per year or 1.0% per month"
What on earth does that mean? Inflation of 6% annualized is 0.4% per month.
Big Macs against the S&P 500 is some sort of chart crime. Yeah, companies became more valuable because we're good at making companies. That's got very little to do with ... anything. [edit] Especially since the S&P 500 isn't some sort of platonic ideal - it's a moving target! They replace companies over time!
Further, wage growth not matching production efficiencies or even decelerating is not a monetary policy issue (or anything to do with inflation) but a social policy issue. Specifically, minimum wage not tracking inflation, and in my opinion, a broad-based rejection of unions.
It's kind of hard to take these sites seriously when they fail at both math and economics.
And more than that when they steal my back button.
It can be both a monetary policy issue and a social policy issue.
Entities that are close to the money-creation spigot that is the Fed have a decreasing cost of money and debt. Anyone / thing further from the cheap supply of money have seen less benefit. The people working for minimum wage are very far from the cheap supply of money.
Social policy, as you point out, has not kept up with monetary policy. But the problem is initiated from monetary policy.
Indexing minimum wage to inflation substantially solves the problem.
Can you quantify the spread you claim exists here? I feel like just pointing to the "cantillon effect" and blaming it for everything without actually quantifying the magnitude of the issue you think exists is harmful to the discourse.
The charter of the central bank is to maintain low predictable inflation and maximize employment. That's the function of monetary policy.
Also perhaps fractional reserve banking does create the issue thatp those who can borrow money and buy assers have an advantage over those at the bottom who strugglle to buy assets and cannot borrow.
I am certainly a fan of modern day capitalism compared to socialist redistribution, but a lot can maybe be fixed with "honest" money of some sort that is not easy to inflate at will. (Algorithmic money perhaps like a carefully designed crypto or some variation of gold backing)
The challenge with honest money, is you cannot really control monetary policy (the free market will set interest rates) , but the benefit is, nobody can debase it too easily.
i. e. no bailing out wallstreet during recessions, but also if you gonna bailout consumers with stimmies they will pay for it later in higher taxes.
The thing is, the breakdowns, source materials, algorithms, data - they're all published. This isn't Joe Biden goes to the podium and bestows unto us that the CPI was 7% annualized this quarter and doesn't take follow-up questions. Everything is tracked, measured and published by the BLS. [1] People don't take it at face value, think tanks run their own assessments too. Then you have crackpots that just "add 7.5%" to the number and call it a day. [2]
But intuitively we know that "just add 7.5%" is way too high, because if the annualized inflation had been 10% since the year 2000, that means prices would have to be a minimum of 8X higher than they were in 2000.
- In the year 2000 an iMac cost $799. The latest iMac is $1299, not $7000. That would be 2.2% inflation.
- In the year 2002 a Big Mac cost $2.39. Today a Big Mac is $3.99, not $19.12. That would also be 2.6% inflation.
This whole conspiracy theory around a wildly different "shadow" CPI is just that.
You can even compute your own based on receipts you have lying around. I suspect you'll find it not materially different from the published numbers.
> Also perhaps fractional reserve banking does create the issue thatp those who can borrow money and buy assers have an advantage over those at the bottom who strugglle to buy assets and cannot borrow.
I'm not rejecting the cantillon effect wholesale, I'm asking for a quantification, which I have yet to see anyone provide. Folks tend to point at it and blame it for everything but then not have any substantiation of its size.
However, I strongly suspect poor folks and especially middle class folks, have far more debt as a percentage of net worth than rich folks do and so spend more time at the spigot so to speak - relatively, not in absolute terms.
> The challenge with honest money, is you cannot really control monetary policy (the free market will set interest rates) , but the benefit is, nobody can debase it too easily.
Debase is a poor term to use because modern economics shows us that supply and value are not tied in the way folks intuit. For instance, Japan has 3X'd their money supply since 1990 but their CPI is literally dead-ass 0% and has been for 30 years. Their prices for anything and everything on average remain exactly the same as in 1990. This is why we reject the Austrian school.
> ... but also if you gonna bailout consumers with stimmies they will pay for it later in higher taxes.
Money has a value and a duration. Stimulus bills pull future money into the present. You don't pay for it later in taxes, per se. If the stimulus creates economic activity yielding revenues in excess of the stimulus itself then it can be 'free.'
A stimulus is an investment and it is a common mistake to look at the liabilities line without looking at the assets line.
[2] http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
You might as well ask for a quantification of the Matthew Effect [1] ... you won't get one. Would it be helpful? Yes, probably.
But more important than having a quantification is, that people register the fact that such effects exist. Depending upon how most people would define fairness, the conclusion from the existence of these effects could then be: there need to be measures taken (taxes, subsidies, ...) so there's some degree of compensation, otherwise society will find itself in an (unnecessarily) instable dynamic.
It reads as if you put some kind of blame on those poorer people who borrow money .. or do I get this wrong?
You do realize that taking on debt doesn't make these poorer people the ones who create the money, right?
The banks lending out the money are the creators of fresh money. And likewise it's not the debtors but the banks who collect the interest. The interest, which represents the exact (and only) amount of money that'll effectively have been created out of nothing after everything will have been payed back. The much bigger credit sum which the banks hand out to the debtors, that's just lending from the future, not money creation.
For instance I have a 2.75-ish% APR 30 year fixed rate mortgage but inflation was 7%, so I made a ton of money by having that debt - factoring in tax breaks, I made nearly 6% return by having that mortgage over paying off my house.
I’m suggesting that lower and middle class folks have far more debt as a percentage of net worth and therefore benefit more as a percentage of net worth than wealthy folks from inflation (“being at the spigot”).
This is roughly right, as inflation rates go up to 12% inequality actually declines. Rich folks lose money on equities due to DCF modeling and folks with debt see it inflate away. I can find the study if you like.
But this is all conditional on wages keeping pace.
Agree. This is one effect of inflation that's beneficial for debtors.
There's another effect that lets especially lower wealth/income groups look not so good: the structure of net worth. Wealthy and high income group people typically have assets that will be more or less inflation neutral. I don't need to make a list: real estate, stocks, ... the big fortunes consisting of these won't care one bit about inflation. Low income people mostly don't have these. If they own anything at all, it's mostyl cash, so hit 100 % by inflation.
> But this is all conditional on wages keeping pace.
Here's the catch ... according to [1]:
> Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that between 65% and 70% of people in 25 advanced countries saw no increase in their earnings between 2005 and 2014.
You might say, hey, we didn't have much inflation according to CPI from 2005 to 2014. Well, then just take housing prices, which make up a big chunk of most peoples' expenses and have increased significantly over this period according to OECD data [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/14/up-to-70-pe... [2] https://data.oecd.org/chart/6yZt
In a growing economy (where more tangible goods and services are delivered to customers) this can be true, yes.
Kind of off-topic: I very much doubt this concept/aspiration/narrative/foundation or principle of planning/budgeting worldwide economy/expenses will remain viable for more than 20 years from now.
Why? Because humankind would be well advised to regard consumption of fossil energy as peak value, from where it continuously needs to decrease (rapidly so). The one driver of economic growth - energy, key to any human activity - ought to better have a lid on for decades to come. Not a good outlook for growth (of said tangible goods and services).
"Printing" money is a side effect caused by people delaying their spending eternally. You can have an fixed supply inflation free 0% interest currency with an annual fee on excess liquitiy (often known as negative interest). All you need to do is implement the demurrage fee on cash via expiration dates. Expired notes require a fee to be exchanged, the expiry date is printed on a replaceable sticker.
Interest rates and capital gains kinda act like a tax as well because wealthy people concentrate in a few high profile cities and are not spread out like local bank branches.
Oh and land is a natural monopoly so land owners get their cut as well.
Today it's less than 1%.
More realistically the new minimum wage in the US is ~$13-$15 per hour, which you can earn from Walmart, Target, Amazon, Walgreens, CVS, Best Buy and most of the rest. They can't get enough labor and will hire almost anyone that walks in the door.
These days you can trivially earn $13-$15 / hour to start, working at popular convenience stores like Sheetz, Wawa and numerous others like them.
Skills required? The ability to talk to people normally, show up to work and scan bar codes.
If someone is going to reference the US minimum wage, pretending that it matters for the Big Mac context, then it's quite relevant what percentage of the labor force is actually earning the minimum wage. Today that number is exceptionally low and it's trivial for most people in the bottom labor tier to earn far more than minimum wage.
About the only places still commonly paying minimum wage, are small mom & pop businesses in the middle of nowhere (ie places entirely devoid of competition from the previously mentioned big businesses). Independent convenience stores run by Joe and Susie Shop Owner in Buckhannon West Virginia, jobs held by local teenagers that can't drive 60 minutes to the nearest Walmart (except of course even Buckhannon has a Walmart Supercenter; a town in the middle of nowhere with 5,000 people).
The biggest entry-level US employers - which hoover up labor anywhere they can get it - are all paying far more than the minimum wage (along with other now standard benefits like health insurance, which is very expensive and not included in the pay figures).
More importantly, Big Mac Index is based on the average US price. But Big Macs in, say, Arkansas can be almost 40% cheaper than one from California. So it's really not fair to compare the federal minimum wage to the national price.
It does now. If it were raised to 15-20 an hour how many would it effect? If there was zero effect then it would have already passed because it would have been easy points for a congressmen to say "Look what I did for the poor and hopeless I care".
Minimum wage in those states is increasingly meaningless as almost no one will work for that wage. The longer the minimum wage isn't updated, the more irrelevant it is.
Seattle has a higher minimum wage now of $14.50, but it is also mostly meaningless at this point. Conservatives used to propose $20 minimum wages as slippery slope straw men, but these days that proposed wage wouldn't be considered a straw man at all.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-stock-markets-rally-to...
Working hours to buy a stock on the S&P 500.
US income hasn’t increased equally though. The rich could already afford a Big Mac.
In major metros, city councils prevented construction - as such supply could not meet demand and the price of housing in cities went up dramatically more than inflation.
Outside major metros, minimum setback rules, minimum size rules, and myriad other policies conspired to make the average new house twice as large as they were before, while families on average shrunk.
That said, adjusted for inflation, 1 square foot of new house costs exactly the same today as it did in the 1970s.
This is what it looks like when you have federalized zoning and allow supply to meet demand. [2, 3] This is what it looks like when you do not. [4]
I also reject the idea that it was easier to buy houses back in the day on average on a per square foot basis. In the 70s, we saw mortgage interest rates as high as 12% on a 30 year fixed. You can buy a significantly more expensive house on the same monthly payment when you're on a 30-year fixed 2% APR mortgage vs a 12% APR mortgage.
It doesn't matter that purchasing power was higher back then per unit because today you get significantly more units.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JPNCPIHOUQINMEI
[3] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning...
> Outside major metros, minimum setback rules, minimum size rules, and myriad other policies conspired to make the average new house twice as large as they were before, while families on average shrunk.
Outside major metros, the economy isn't as hot and demand is tapered back significantly. In cities that have poor economies, housing prices are also cheap. In places that are extremely dense (NYC) with hot economies, housing is still expensive. All I can tell from this is "popularity = high prices", it isn't clear that you could build enough housing to satisfy demand in a hot economy because more people might make the economy even hotter (attracting even more people).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_aerial.jpg
Houses are expensive in SF because people want to live in SF. If SF had 10 times as many housing, then there would simply be 10 times as much economic activity and prices wouldn't budge. If you want cheap housing for your city, make your economy unattractive like Gary Indiana, or, if you like your economy, take the Tokyo approach and make housing speculation unattractive and let units be small.
This is irrelevant, it's obviously not sufficiently dense to meet demand. If you look at the photo you'll obviously see that it's simply not particularly dense by visual inspection.
> Houses are expensive in SF because people want to live in SF.
They are expensive because they do not permit sufficient construction to meet the demand, what about that do you disagree with? It's not just that people want to live there - it's because people want to live there and city council would rather keep a derelict parking lot for Nordstrom than put up a 27-story 500 unit condo building in the middle of downtown. [1]
> If you want cheap housing for your city, make your economy unattractive like Gary Indiana, or, if you like your economy, take the Tokyo approach and make housing speculation unattractive and let units be small.
That has nothing to do with what Tokyo does. Tokyo permits construction via federal zoning rules.
[1] https://thefrisc.com/how-to-unpack-one-supervisors-rejection...
Why does demand always have to be met in one smallish (geographically speaking) city?
> They are expensive because they do not permit sufficient construction to meet the demand, what about that do you disagree with? It's not just that people want to live there - it's because people want to live there and city council would rather keep a derelict parking lot for Nordstrom than put up a 27-story 500 unit condo building in the middle of downtown. [1]
> That has nothing to do with what Tokyo does. Tokyo permits construction via federal zoning rules.
The former probably wouldn't have been approved in Tokyo either. But yes, I do prefer Tokyo's solution to zoning (residential can go anywhere, businesses can mix as well), and their solution to property speculation (housing depreciates rather than appreciates because it is so easy to rebuild)
Still, SF is more dense than Tokyo (6,658 ppl / sqkm vs 6,158 ppl /sqkm), but as mentioned before, SF is tiny while Tokyo is huge.
The demand is created by that community, located in that area - it is endogenous. These communities of people create self-reenforcing network effects. Logically it follows that the supply should be created where the demand is, not just because, well, that's where the demand is - but because it re-enforces this flywheel.
Why would you put the supply somewhere the demand isn't?
Because wealthy people who live off capital gains live there. Tell them to spend their money somewhere else. People move there because they want or need the billionaire's money.
All of which have even more draconian zoning policies that permit only SFH (not even a 5+1). If SF had 10 times as much housing maybe we'd have 10 times as many people being productively employed in industries in the city instead of being forced to locate elsewhere. Maybe some of those people wouldn't HAVE to work in tech/finance to afford the city.
Your opposition to increased density benefits only yourself and existing landowners.
If SF had 10x the people, it’s density would be on par with Shanghai. If only Shanghai real estate were as cheap as SF’s, then we could make a valid comparison.
> NYC expensive, hardly affordable
NYC has record low new supply of housing relative to demand. Not a great example.
This is a very, very important distinction. Right?
The charts you linked are beyond meaningless.