Why the Fed wants corporate America to have a hiring freeze
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
However inflation in consumer staples, energy, and gasoline is an enormous political problem. So what to do?
The “solution”: expansive monetary policy is completely okay so long as most people don’t get any of it.
Inequality is a substantially smaller political problem than the price of gasoline being too high.
Eg the last 2 years where people saw their 401k double, and cost of goods and housing went up.
1. Without an intervention you get the sharp shock of exuberance and crash; this behavior defined 19th century economies and eventually the 1930's depression and its following war that motivated adoption of Keynesian interventionist policy. Economic theory in the academy today is routinely defined in "post-war" terms, as if the preceding centuries did not exist, outside of researchers who make it their speciality.
2. With interventions, you introduce some form of market distortion no matter which way you frame it. The original Keynesian experiment approached a crisis in the late 1960's, because it pushed for fiscal interventions(government spending) which soaked up demand that would have gone to other sectors; when you do this, the other sectors experience rising prices, resulting in the stagflation that defined the 1970's. The transition into the Reagan era(a gradual series of shifts that mostly occurred in the 70's, marked finally with Paul Volker's new Fed policy) marked the shift towards a "lean and mean" neoliberalist approach with rising inequality, as you note: instead of trying to expand the economy through fiscal policy, we began the monetary-focused regime that has lasted up until now, of tuning inflation rates through fiat policy with a focus on allowing capital to redeploy itself wherever it saw fit. This era created a pretty harsh recession, but it did motivate growth again. But inequality eventually drags down an economy by a similar mechanism of "borrowing demand" from consumers and giving it over to capital, and since the strategy is to stimulate with low interest rates as necessary, and regulatory capture has favored keeping the good times a-flowing, we've used it more and more since 2008, until we've ended up in another stagflation crisis marked by our successively larger and larger asset bubbles. Eventually the chickens come home to roost and the resulting asset speculation carries over into consumer prices.
And that's the kind of crisis that existentially threatens the dollar, because if even consumer staples are holding their value better, there is no reason to hold a dollar position, and therefore to trade and be taxed in it. The bet we are making by holding dollars is not really that this can be fixed in any permanent way, but that it can at least hold out for another cycle of growth. And that leads to the headline: pushing up unemployment is one way to suppress dollar demand. It's more palatable than having a war to reallocate assets, at least.
Wouldn’t want that to happen. </sarcasm>
If salary for white collar workers and inflation goes up too much, employing blue collar work becomes unprofitable and those workers get locked out of the labor market.
You are just giving the hypothetical answer where blue collar salaries stay low and I am giving the hypothetical where blue collar salaries rise.
If blue collar wages stay the same, then yes labor costs are discounted.
If they raise, it may make sense to eliminate the position via automation or shipping the job overseas.
Wages are generally sticky, but nobody will take a job if they can't feed their family and pay rent, so inflation will eventually drive the wages up or make the position obsolete.
so no you’re wrong. actually half the reason we’re in this mess is the fed was being too woke trying to lower unemployment rate for ”marginalized” groups not because they were favoring the rich
plus the fed raising rates is destroying asset prices, which are held by the rich. in fact elon and bezos etc have lost double digit percents of their net worth
The bigger issue is fewer young people are working every year. [2]
16 to 19: -24% in the last 20 years
20 to 24: -11% in the last 20 years.
25 to 34: -3% in the last 20 years.
Meanwhile, older people are working more than ever. This exaserbates issues of inequality. Essentially the young and poor are working less and the old and established are working more than ever. Without judgment on their reasons for working or not, it seems like rate of younger generations participating in the workforce is falling much faster than the size of the size of the younger generation is shrinking.https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2... https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-particip...
As for the rest, there are many ways individuals can get by. They can sustain themselves via their partner, get funds from friends and family, participate in underground workplaces, and last but not least, receive income from disability or other social services.
It is worth noting that numbers are falling about twice as fact for men as women. This could be related to the fact that two women now go to college for every one man.
What are these people doing? I read COVID assistance had dried up (?), and still people are not going back into the workforce?
Isn't wage inflation supposed to help there, putting people 'back to work'? I mean, a big chunk of these 8% will be low-paid service jobs I keep hearing no one can hire for anymore ; shouldn't increasing wages (and, well, stopping the 'service-workers are slaves we can treat as dirt' mentality) help a lot here?
i think driving down asset prices and raising wages and lowered unemployment benefits will hopefully reverse some of that
If you freezing hiring thats just gonna cause shortages for domestic goods and services.
Leading write back to higher prices...
The are too many numerate people now to boondoggle. The story the moneyed economists quantify is distilled as “humans do this.”
That there is a model of haves and have nots curated by haves is political theater, not free market economics.
What the Fed wants is more gig worker insecurity as usual: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Ahaha. What.
https://www.crainsnewyork.com/asked-answered/datatrek-resear... (paywalled but the url slug should be enough to infer the content)
Make of that what you will.