Hacker News Reader

> The inflation of 2022 is also largely an illusion - it's really just that a few percentage points of what should have been normal inflation in 2020 and first-half 2021 was time-shifted into 2022.

Food prices are up 48% at the nations second largest grocery chain.

Rent prices are now through the roof, 20-30% year over year increases are common in major cities.

Things are more expensive, full stop, and it isn't just "an extra year" more expensive.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Don't look at year-over-year numbers, you're falling for the illusion. A rent jump of 20% for 2022 is because rents were artificially suppressed in 2020 and 2021.

The right comparison is to look at 2022 compared to 2019 and see if it looks out of line for a three-year period. A few things are, but most aren't.

Also, citing one grocery chain is a cherry-picked outlier. Cite them all if you want a real number and not an artificial illusion.

rent did not go down in 2020

It went down significantly in 2021 for me. Though it popped back up a lot in 2022 if we signed a new lease (did not).

This line of thought doesn't stand up to scrutiny when you look at real data. According to the USDA ERS food price outlook reports @ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/ the 20 year average percent change year on year is something like 2.0% - 2.5%. The change from sept. 2021 to sept 2022 has been 11.2%. The forecasted change in 2022 is approximately 10%. The foretasted change in 2023 is approximately 3.5%. This is dramatically more than just delayed increases from a strange year.

Don't worry, @vikingerik will continue to double down.

That is _not_ exactly what you are talking about: food prices do not normally go up 24% a year. Rent prices do not normally go up 10-15% a year.

If their number is cherry-picked, give a real number yourself. Anecdotally, my grocery bills are easily 30%+ from what they were last year, and the same is true for many people I've asked.

That's still what I'm talking about. Any number you're looking at that's "in a year" is falling victim to the time-shifted demand effects from the pandemic.

Compare 2022 to 2019 and look for the average change over three years. That's the real signal over the temporary noise. There are still some real effects, but it's much smaller than all the one-year-over-year numbers seem to indicate.

This doesn't make sense. How can cost of groceries be up 30% over a three year period be normal. That would leave everyone starving within a decade, and obviously can't be right. Same with the rent increases.

It would not leave everyone starving because salaries go up too, 10% inflation does exist. Argentina deals with 100% yearly inflation and has not blown up yet.

Salaries arnt going up that much. McDonald's near me is still offering 12.50. At best the people in these places got a few more dollars an hour

I’m not speaking about your particular scenario but about situations where inflation is actually more than 10% over several years. Salaries always lag, but they don’t remain at 0% increase. The post I’m replying to said that if inflation was 10% a year in food, everyone would starve in 10 years, and it’s simply not true.

Prices of used cars:

https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-trends/

...you can select the start date for the chart as early as August of 2010. Price increases starting in late 2020 don't look illusory to me.

This is pretty obvious knock on effect of the pandemic too. Inflation isn't making it so that every new car is selling at or above MSRP currently.

I suppose it matters whether you consider inflation a cause or an effect?

I think that is a good point, and one of the reasons this inflationary period seems to be so widely misunderstood and contentious. We just spent over 2 years dealing with a pandemic, there will be side effects caused by the pandemic as well as the solutions to ease its impact.

In regard to car prices, I would say that the prices themselves contribute to the inflation statistics, but they are not caused by inflationary pressure.

If you want to start arguments you can call that opportunistic rent seeking, something to consider in face of 2021 having record corporate profits. That idea is plausible enough that even some more conservative outlets gave it coverage: https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2...

Look at their profits. This is a symptom of greed more than inflation.

Recent research illustrates these inflationary-profit trends, in particular busting the myth of a wage-price spiral driven by increased worker incomes. Over 53% of price increases in the last two years have been driven by profit margin gains

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2022/05/10/how-w...

May be greed, or may be because of regulatory capture. I.e. it is incredibly expensive to start a company due to all the requirements that the companies that do exist can continue to raise prices with no competition.

> Look at their profits. This is a symptom of greed more than inflation.

Inflation is just a rise in prices. Literally just defined as a rise in prices. It doesn't matter if the prices accurately reflect rising costs of doing business or wind up in profits.

Inflation is more about the ability of consumers to continue to pay higher prices and the inelastic demand for whatever the good is. The market is fundamentally an auction and prices get bid up until elastic demand starts to appear.

Ask yourself why all of these companies were not greedy in previous years, and how it happened that they all became greedy at approximately the same time. The answer is that this line about greed is political propaganda you’ve been fed. The companies involved were merely responding to market forces as they always do, /for example:

1) Near zero interest rates during the pandemic - technically set by the Fed, but under obvious political pressure to do it from both the former and current administrations.

2) Helicopter money from the government. I’m not just talking about the one time checks that people use as a strawman to attack as an inflation cause. There were student loan pauses, 300/mo per child credit(they tried to make it permanant!), and more. The fact that much of the money actually went to younger or poorer folks, which we celebrate, probably also drove inflation much more than money going to rich people, because the poor and the young are the most likely to immediately spend it. Lots of pandemic loans given to businesses too with little to no oversight too.

3) Supply side constraints due to shutdowns at suppliers overseas.

4) Demand side rebound demand for things people avoided or weren’t allowed during the pandemic.

Much of this is likely attributable to government policy, so I blame our political class.

> Ask yourself why all of these companies were not greedy in previous years,

In the case of Safeway/Albertsons, they jacked food prices up to make their finances look better for a merger.

Flip side of this would be a subscription company dropping prices (or offering lots of promos) to gain lots of subs before a merger.

No company operates in a vacuum. Particularly, companies in commodity based industries, like grocery chains, which average maybe 3-5% gross margins, cannot arbitrarily increase prices without consequences (drop in demand). People will shift their purchasing power elsewhere. Unless, of course, every where else is also increasing prices because of the sheer amount of excess monetary liquidity sloshing around in the economy.

> People will shift their purchasing power elsewhere.

You are neglecting that people may not have a choice.

For people w/o cars, they are limited to whatever grocery stores are within walking distance, or accessible by mass transit.

In my case, my easiest choices are the extremely overpriced organic store, Safeway, or QFC. Once Safeway and QFC merge, I'll be down to basically two local choices, and I live in a major metro.

I know people who have one grocery store around them. There are parts of the country[1] where in a ~15+ mile radius you have a single choice for shopping.

Now throw in people who don't have the time, or ability, to commute, and many grocery stores can charge whatever the heck they want up to the limit of what consumers can afford.

https://mobile.twitter.com/moetkacik/status/1580938712740831...

From that thread, yes indeed, the price increase is 76% for 2019 to 2022, but that is (obviously) a completely absurd level of price increases for a 3 year timespan.

And this isn't some unique situation, this is pricing at one of America's largest grocery retailers, a grocery store chain that is the sole grocery store in many communities, and a grocery store chain that is set to soon become much larger.

[1] This isn't unusual, in Washington State if you go outside any major city, you find that smaller cities/towns basically have one Safeway for the surrounding area and that is it. Visiting friends on the east coast, I noticed a similar situation, a cluster of small towns and a single grocery store (Kroger owned).

> Food prices are up 48% at the nations second largest grocery chain.

This is a very specific claim to be completely unsourced. What is the chain, and what is the time period you are referring to?

The latest CPI [0] has food prices up 11.2% over the past 12 months, so 48% would be more than just an outlier.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm

The data just does not seem to line up with your assessment. Labor force participation rate is down 1% since pre-pandemic. It's not earth shattering, but it is quite a drop.

Also inflation is hardly a few percentage points of catch up. Look at the chart below and tell me you still believe that.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Not to mention food/gas is worse which is what hits people in low to mid income ranges the most.

LFPR is up for people under 50. The drop in overall LFPR can be almost entirely attributed to the drop in immigration during the pandemic.

>overall LFPR can be almost entirely attributed to the drop in immigration during the pandemic.

I just heard a report this morning that there was a very real labor participation rate drop among women, particularly with working mothers. How does your immigration hypothesis align with that? Is it that child care work is primarily driven by immigrant workers? Or is it that other groups more than make up for that in the general statistic?

Probably the latter. The LFPR for <25 saw a significant bump.

>a fairly normal 12% over three years

That's roughly double the Fed target rate — annualized 3.8%, which would be the highest any year save 2008, which was itself an anomaly due to the GFC. The last time inflation exceeded 3.5%, save 2008, was in 1991. So 12% in three years is in no sense normal (for the USA).

The inflation is real, and it's serious. It's actually produced a reduction in real wages [1] despite much excitement about workers' bargaining power. Progressives complaining about the Fed (which is finally reacting reasonably) seem to be missing that preventing a wage–price spiral is not the same thing as union-busting.

1: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

I really hope you are right but the massive debt taken on by all the western countries has me worried about their ability to actually respond to a hard recession if it hits this winter.

Public debt is a strange thing. The gross public debt of the US is 135% of its GDP[1] but Japan has it at 266%[2] and they've done okay so far, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_Japan

12% inflation over 3 years is not normal. The previous time it was 12% over any 3 years was back in the raging inflation years of the early 1980s.

Finally, it's not even 12% -- if you look at the 3 year chart here, it's 16% over 3 years, even less normal:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

The problem is that it is in the political interests of a lot of groups that many people believe it...