US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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”.
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.
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.
i.e. it declined in nominal rates and collapsed by almost 4x if adjusted by CPI
It was falling at a stable pace for 20 years in nominal terms. I don’t see how can someone see anything else looking at the price chart.
And inflation was still 4-5% through the 80s and didn’t fall to 2% until 2000. So it was a horrible asset to hold.
Just buying government bonds in the 80s and 90s was a much better idea.
It was not. Look at the chart: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
Between 1984 and 1996, 131 of the 156 months were within $50 of the average nominal price, and the lowest point, December 1984, was only $89 below the average. In particular from 1993 to 1996 the price was never more than $10 off average. If you bought gold in July 1979, which was an all time high at the time, the nominal value of your gold never decreased.
Looking at the inflation adjusted numbers there is much more volatility, but again, the value of gold in Jan 1989 was the same as the value of gold in Jan 1979. If you happened to buy gold during its peak in Jan 1980, you wouldn't see an inflation adjusted profit until October 2024.
Gold is not generally a good asset to hold to make money, but that's not what is under discussion here. The question is can the value of gold be used as a proxy for inflation. Gold going up is like smelling smoke - you know there is a fire. I am not arguing that inhaling large quantities of smoke is the best way to protect yourself during a fire.
So it can’t unless you stretch the period out so such an extent that there basically just 1-2 data points left?
Or are you claiming that prices and money supply between ~1980 and 2000 increasing by more than 2x?
Because otherwise it’s an extremely lagging indicator. More like what’s left after the fire than early smoke.
vanity (jewelry, a luxury product)
Jewelry traditionally functioned as a rough store of value because it's easy to sell quickly (albeit at a steep discount), and it makes a remarkably reliable Veblen good, as a glance at the Oval Office will demonstrate.
If you bought in 1980 you would have had to wait until 2024 to break even when adjusted by CPI…
Maybe "good at" was stretching it, but there are things that lagged forever, such as a retail savings account and Japanese government bonds. It's tracked CPI better than silver.
So 55 years. 1980 and 2001 was almost half of that and the real price of gold declined by 4-5x. If you take out the spike in the late it’s still almost 2x or so compared to the 70s (very volatile period).
This wasn’t lag. M2 supply grew continuously and increased by >3x during he two decades while even the nominal price of gold declined.
After the gold standard was abandoned it became a highly speculative volatile asset.
It’s easy to make data to fit your narrative when you ignore everything that conflicts with it..
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-us-inflation-ra...
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
SHADOWSTATS(t) = 1.9 + 0.0055*t + CPIAUCNS(t)
* https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r...
> Truflation
* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1beg6db/how_r...
> Billion Prices
They actually published code so other folks could recreate:
It’s not? The first two things that came to mind to check are almost exactly doubled:
Case-Schiller for Seattle metro area for example is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEXRNSA/
Price of eggs is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111
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.
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.
Our military budget remains a comically bad allocation of funds. If we're going to be isolationist and we are, we should cut our number of carrier groups in half and throw all of that money into subsidies.
>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.
>This combined with American lack of enthusiasm for maintaining this global order, likely means that globalization will come to an end.
Oh here friend, I think you forget to add a citation to all that, here's your citation so people know where the idea come from (not you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zeihan
Do I really think China is going to disappear over demographics? I think if you would gone back to the 1980s he would have looked at the Japanese demographics and said the same thing.
Japan is still around and it's doing fine.
Are we going to see privateers and one eyed captains pirating international trade like he once predicted? Not in the age of carriers.
But what navies can do is they can harass ships: board them, inspect them, delay them. Arbitrarily close shopping lanes and force them to take other routes (China could do this to make their exports preferable to say Vietnams).
Zeihan parrots a lot of other geopolitical thought and international relations thought. The general question post cold war was when the US will go isolationist. I believe largely that did not happen because US industrials wanted offshore production for cheap labor. So the US maintained its global focus.
With China, and Xi in particular, doing the things that they are doing to him in capitalism in China, that is forcing a reevaluation of companies have their production.
Sure. You could move it to Vietnam or Malaysia or Thailand or various countries like that, but that still places them within the Chinese military sphere.
When you consider that we have a country like Mexico south of our border which is extremely productive, more productive than practically any other country. We currently have our production outsourced to any degree, why not move our production to Mexico?
Most of our natural resources, especially with the discovery of shale oil in The Dakotas is sourceable from the northern hemisphere.
But we'll see what happens
What you really need to understand is that we can, and we must absolutely, generally and non-exceptionally have low inflation at all times. There's absolutely no sane reason to have high inflation in a low-corruption financial system - none!
> Globalization... US Navy... US military... China hybrid... American lack of enthusiasm for guaranteeing shipping trade on the oceans.
A bunch of red herrings meaning nothing... It's not lack of enthusiasm, it's the overabundance of enthusiasm for tariffs and sanctions backed by the same US Navy & US Military to maintain a restricted trade regime which, not-accidentally, results in the US public being trapped in a monopolized and inflationary market.
> And that involves a huge amount of switching costs, which essentially is going to be inflation.
You mean, the population will bear the costs via the inflation tax, while the rich will be getting richer, because... historical norms should not be broken, especially this one?
Historically, messed up trade led to global wars, actually, it's either global trade or global wars, there's no middle ground. You failed to mention that important historical norm which is also one of the ways to make the rich richer.
The historical norms are something we should absolutely steer clear of, not use them as excuses for more nonsense in the future!
History is history. Maybe you think AI is going to herald in some era of non-inflation and free people from the control of the ultra rich.
It's pretty apparent to me that AI isn't going to do that. It's going to do very very very very very much the opposite.
I agree that disruption of trade leads to wars. Usually of very large scale but we haven't had one of those since the advent of nuclear weapons.
And people keep misinterpreting my comment that I believe Donald Trump has good policy. I absolutely don't. That's why I said the tariffs are insane. Theoretically what Donald Trump wants to do is bring manufacturing back to his white voters in the former middle class, and bring the US into an isolationist stance.
Biden did not put troops on the ground in Ukraine. I believe bush II would have enthusiastically. Biden did not roll back the tarriffs Trump imposed in his first term either.
So generally the overall political trend in the United States is to be like this.
Ask the rest of your comment. You could ignore history if you want and hope for something different. But.... Well you should know the quote about history, and I don't want to have to repeat it:-)
I've never mentioned either, nor do I assume what you think about them.
> So generally the overall political trend in the United States is to be like this.
The question I'm pondering isn't "what the trend is to be" but rather "why it has to change". Thinking about who and how could change it should wait, lest we end up putting the cart before the horse.
> You could ignore history if you want and hope for something different.
Being careful about not falling into the same traps as before isn't "ignoring history", it's learning from history, which is mostly the opposite of repeating it, because repeating the same thing with the same bad result is the definition of idiocy.
There have been research programs that collected the data themselves:
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.
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.
If you implement a tiered tax credit on gross regenue earned for wages paid, that decreases exponentially from the lowest-paid worker percentile to the highest, then producers could offset the tax on imported materials by paying an increased share of the revenue to their lowest-paid workers rather than raising prices. The government wins because household buying power and taxes paid increase, the household wins because buying power increases are decoupled from price increases, and shareholders win because wage increases shift the domestic demand outward (rightward), compensating for downward shift along the demand curve from price increases.
Setting the refund rate to (the target inflation rate minus the current inflation rate) times a constant defined by the Fed alongside the reserve rate also provides the Fed a long-term lever of financial incentive: for firms to increase wages paid rather than profits paid, when the Fed raises the constant to combat price inflation, and to increase profits paid rather than wages paid when the Fed lowers the constant to combat price stagnation. It also offers a control against layoffs for profit by specifying such that reduction in workforce in each percentile reduces the target inflation rate in the above equation; a layoff of the entire lowest-paid percentile to avoid lowering prices would result in a significant tax penalty charged at the next higher percentile’s rates, unless prices were so stagnant (or decreasing!) that the Fed’s target had been adjusted to allow it.
That this isn’t coded into today’s U.S. monetary policy is certainly true; but it merely requires an act of Congress to resolve. It’s important not to take for granted that what we’re used to is therefore what must be.
If you tax corporations directly, they’ll just raise prices to pass the tax on to workers — but if you don’t tax corporate profits properly, they’ll just raise prices to consume all worker income and suffocate the dual competitors of entrepreneurs and of quality of life gains by households — so you have to tax corporations in a way that charges them extra revenue tax when their profits go up faster than their wages, neutralized only by paying workers more and maintain or lower prices. That’s what this proposes: either they help the Fed meet inflation targets by raising wages rather than prices, or they see their profits reduced in a way that can’t be charged to workers — as doing so would raise prices and thus inflation, which would further amplify their tax against their profits, resulting in a death spiral for their corporation between shrinking demand and growing overhead. (And, in times of deflation, the opposite: they are compelled by threat of reduces profits to raise prices rather than wages, just as they do today exclusively, until inflation stabilizes at the Fed target of whatever percent.)
This all works because, in the U.S., the uncontrolled component of inflation is the growth in profits minus the growth in wages. You can’t specify a wage floor or companies will just lay people off or raise prices, and you can’t impose a simple tax on corporate profits or companies will just lay people off or raise prices. The only way to prevent that is to tax (growth in profits – growth in wages – inflation target), which in an excess-inflation climate such as today — combined with the classic U.S. revenue-scaled tax rate schedules — would cost corporations who don’t invest excessive profit growth back into their workforce more than the simple cost of the wage increases would have.
(The R&D exemption that Amazon abuses would, as previously discussed, need to be restricted to less than 100% of research costs; use the same profit tiering schedules as above so that R&D for a billion-dollar gross-profit before-deductions company is capped at one half of the annual inflation rate — once you’re making that much, you don’t need the exemption to grow.)
(Offshore labor would need to be estimated at the federal minimum wage rate adjusted for currency strength/weakness to the country hosting that labor, unless explicitly documented otherwise through worker counts and wages, which would significantly worsen the value of offshoring: offshoring-to-cheap-labor companies would be at a significant disadvantage for growth taxation versus those that simply paid the costs of domestic investment, training, and wages.)
Instead we get rhetoric, middle class taxes, and upper class tax breaks
Another thing to watch for is the BLS import prices which show prices excluding tariffs. If these remain flat for July as they did for June, it would be another data point suggesting tariffs induced inflation.
> Services inflation provided much of the push higher, moving 1.1% higher in July for the largest gain also since March 2022. Trade services margins rose 2%, coming amid ongoing developments in President Donald Trump’s tariff implementations.
> In addition, 30% of the increase in services came from a 3.8% increase in machinery and equipment wholesaling. Also, portfolio management fees surged 5.8% and airline passenger services prices rose 1%.
* https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/14/ppi-inflation-report-july-20...
> The government on Tuesday reported a mild increase in consumer prices in July, though rising costs for services like dental care and airline tickets caused a measure of underlying inflation to post its largest gain in six months.
> While financial markets have priced in an interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve next month, rising services inflation and the expectation tariffs could still significantly boost goods prices left some economists doubtful of a resumption in policy easing in the absence of labor market deterioration.
* https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-producer-prices-accelera...
When it comes to (Fed) policy, the other thing they look at besides inflation/PCE is employment, which appears to be softening (see recent revisions which caused recent Trump-BLS turmoil).
The US risk for stagflation seems to be growing:
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stagflation.asp
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
* https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/its-beginning-to-smell-a-... (check out the music video link at the end)
I can't tell you how many times I've heard the idea that success in free market capitalism comes from offering goods and services to customers with the right balance between quality and price, and that good quality and price is assured because of competition in the market.
But now I see that the true path to success is to first gain favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then use their wealth and power to reduce or eliminate competition.
At a smaller scale (the majority of business, but maybe not the majority of revenue), that existing wealth and power is often much smaller and eliminating competition is much less feasible.
Like a local coffee shop, for example. Or a small industry specific software company.
Maybe they matter less in the grand scheme, but they're still a big part of things.
But I do agree with the idea that VC subsidized services to then grip the market and wring them later seem counter productive to a "free market".
> But now I see that the true path to success is to first gain favor from those who already have wealth and power, and then use their wealth and power to reduce or eliminate competition.
is attractive to the disaffected (as Nietzsche wrote on). narratives that say the whole thing is rigged are going to be appealing because they offer a non-intrinsic explanation for underperformance.
Yes, you can certainly get wealthy by being corrupt in legal ways.
The domain name here isn't really driving the comments or content that I can tell.
> The producer price index increased 0.9% from a month earlier, the largest advance since consumer inflation peaked in June 2022, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report out Thursday
The more significant concern it seems to me is the rate of increase. Nearly a full percentage point in a month seems like a lot, but I'm no expert.
It's concerning. It's hard to say much more than that yet.
The fed argues that, If inflation expectations fall, interest rates would decline too. In turn, there would be less room to cut interest rates to boost employment during an economic downturn.
this economics explanation feels like gaslighting every time i hear the fed mention it. the reserve literally pushed negative rates and quantitative easing for so long that people came to expect prosperity as a feature of the economic framework of the nation, and now that we have rampant inflation that cannot be controlled by normal means (prime rate) the fed somehow wants us all to understand its our fault for enjoying affordable burger meat.
This is only the nominal price, I can’t find the inflation adjusted graph, but I assume it’s clear that if the nominal price now is the same as several other periods over 10 years ago, then the gas today is cheaper over inflation adjusted dollar
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
Note 10 years ago is 2015. The period over 10 years ago is the period of extremely high prices under discussion(mid 2000s to 2014)
Part of those external forces involves consumers in a major way.
Being off by 40% is cause for alarm in almost any circumstance.
And then headline figure PPI was even higher at 0.9% for the month, 3.3% year.
So the real number would be 1.006^12=7.44%
And over 7% inflation is a bit more than 'pretty high' that's getting really scary if there's no clear outside reason for it
The public was so incensed that they threw out the government.
I don't believe it had anything to do with the price of eggs, either. That was presented as the primary reason, and it's so clearly wrong that it makes me suspicious.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
As an environmentalist, I essentially have no party, and so while I hate Donald Trump, I understand exactly why he was voted into office.
Yes, one is worse than the other. But in terms of real environmental policy, they are functionally the same.
The state of California passed the 2/3rds powered by renewables mark https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/07/14/in-historic-first-californ...
The Republicans are looking at bringing back coal mining. You’re just completely incorrect in your classification of both parties being as bad on the environment unless your bucket is so broad as to be meaningless for use in comparing two organizations
When multiple independent research groups show that the impact of implementing these policies show significant reduction in projected greenhouse gas emissions and rolling them back shows the opposite effect, how do you make the claim that they are "functionally the same"? And I don't even count the soft power - one side consistently claims that climate change is a hoax and the other side consistently takes it seriously.
I don't understand this at all. I could get behind an "enlightened centrist" position when it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East. But environmental policy?
How is our charging infrastructure compared to say Europe's?
Considering we've had the technology for almost 30 years now, why isn't practically every consumer vehicle a phev?
I'm not going to believe any projected carbon emissions. I'm going to believe real carbon emissions that get measured. Hey, guess what? They are still going up.
I get that they were solar subsidies, but it's my strong opinion that there should have been unrefusable subsidies for home solar. I get so sick of the utility people complaining about how hard it's going to be to adapt the grid to alternative energy. Yet in the same time they bad mouth home solar which basically alleviates grid load.
There still is no effective policy implementations on reducing sprawl, except that which simply resists building housing in general.
And while I generally think nuclear energy isn't really an effective solution for clean energy, it should still be aggressively researched, although I think they should be chasing lftrs like China is.
You can say a lot of these are simply politically infeasible. That speaks more to the nature of the Democrats being a corporatist party than anything. a lot of these policies, especially ones around alternative energy and transport electrification which would functionally drop the price of energy and transportation, a key driver to economic growth in the long term, should have been a strong sell overall to the business lobby in general.
I'm not going to disagree that the only place that you're going to get some environmental progress is the Democratic party.
My point is that progress is mostly for show.
There's plenty of space to hide reality when building a price index.
Price index do not capture the reality of most people cost of living. They don't capture the family that have to buy margarine instead of butter, because butter became too expensive, while margarine became cheaper, Weight both items as the same, and voilá! no inflation, increases in the price of butter were cancelled by cheaper margarine, fuck you if you prefer butter.
We can also do the same with housing: Capture prices as the average of a basket of cities. In reality, some cities will have absurd price increases while others are in decadence. The average prices increase of a disputed locality like NYC metro area will probably be masked by the fact that houses in BeltRustAssEnd, MI are becoming increasingly cheap. But, for the real person, what the fuck matters if BeltRustAssEnd houses are cheap as bananas? Who can get a job there?
And of course, a single number cannot capture the subtleties of reality like the fact that while it is great that 80" TVs are now so cheap that they can be bought by the commoner, this fact means fucking nothing if having a roof over your head in a place where you don't need to spend most of your live commuting is becoming increasingly too expensive for a lot of the same folks. Too bad the commoner is just a paycheck away from being in the streets as he cannot pay for a house! He now has a TV that not even Queen Elisabeth could have just a few years ago!
The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion.
Verifiable metrics* are the only way to get any sort of objective handle on this.
* Edit: I replied below that I should have said verifiable metrics and context with discussion. Verifiable metrics are necessary but not sufficient.
But, instead a single index based on what is basically a bunch of arbitrary choices of a bunch of bureaucrats, subject to all kind of agendas and political/economical/social pressure, and based on an simulacrum of science that stands upon a bunch of questionable premises and unfalseable propositions is Truth.
The pythagorean cult of number has been a disgrace for the human race.
People usually aren't objective though even when looking around at their own lives. When evaluating inflation in groceries they'll point to a few things that have had some pretty massive spikes (beef, eggs, soda) and ignore a lot of the other things in their shopping cart that hasn't had anywhere near as much inflation (grains, pastas, lunchmeats, pork, lots of vegetables, potatoes, lots of fresh fruit, etc).
It can be pretty difficult for most people to actually be objective when looking at the world. Tons of people let emotions dominate what they see.
I'm not arguing the BLS price index numbers are entirely perfect measures of reality, but the number of times I've had people tell me things like eating out is 10x more expensive than it was a few years ago is quite high. Is that an objective reality?
>The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion.
Good advice for non-inflationary times as well.
But either way sometimes I'm only interested in what effect it has on the general public more than anything else.
I have no metrics other than real-time experience against what has been published over the last 55 years and how it correlates anecdotally, so please don't take what I say as serious fortune-telling, when it's nothing but ancient history ;)
Five years ago even seems like it's gone and almost forgotten.
This week at Walmart, where they have better data if not better economists than thou, they rolled back some sensitive stuff I've been watching for about 10 years or more. First of all there had been great hesitation for over a year to raise anything more than they had in earlier years (it was already up a lot), but you could tell there was internal pressure building as other retailers could hesitate no more. They've got to be able to have a decent markup in the face of constantly rising costs, or why even bother. So earlier this year the cumulative price increases over 5 years finally reached a full 50%. I can only imagine there are some Walmart leaders who never wanted it to happen just because they are patriotic Americans and it's not right, others who hesitated as much as they could because of "optics". That's a fairly sobering line to cross when prices had remained absolutely stable for many years since launch, as designed. But 50 full percent it did reach, and that was the stuff they were trying to hold back most on.
Not like the 300% or more gradual increase over 10 years on many non-bargain items more often sharing eye-level shelf space. These are not a growing category because Walmart is moving upscale, no it's because so many people having upscale habits can't afford upscale prices any more, when not too long ago they could easily.
That 50% increase over 5 years on selected bargain program items? Just rolled back to when it equaled only a 33% increase, real quick this week. This is back in line with the prices before the latest rise. Probably hoping it works since people still seemed to be buying OK at those prices before, not much differently than last year, or they wouldn't have dared raise them in 2025 at all.
No rollbacks on the +300% items at this time though.
I don't want to consider tariff-sensitive items either, or those competitive with Amazon, that would be a whole different equation. But this particular "Walmart Rollback" is not like the rest, and I've seen them all since they built their first non-rural store to begin with in my city decades ago.
This time it's not the kind of over-competitive tactic they were famous for using, when they were building bigger stores than ever and "monopolized" that terminology for marketing. Now it's a quiet rollback in response to fewer shoppers, spending less on bargain items where there is no remaining competition. After holding off on price rises for so long, nominally catching up with inflation was not nearly intended to determine the point at which consumers couldn't take it any more, but you've got to face it when things stop flying off the shelf. If you weren't paying attention they don't want everybody to remember that the prices were that much higher a few weeks ago, it was embarrassing. Yes, they needed the money, but it's not going to do any good if there's not enough people able to purchase.
Also this week, a local pawn shop temporarily not loaning money or purchasing almost any items except for gold, because "people just aren't buying or redeeming other merchandise any more".
Just so happens that 10% per year over 5 years adds up to about 50%. Walmart wouldn't have jacked prices that high if it wasn't undeniably needed finally based on all the data they have.
I've noticed this for a while, I remember what it felt like when Nixon was getting ready for his recession, and he was absolutely as non-crooked as he could get. And I well remember how it felt when it reached a conservatively government-reported 10% per year. At the beginning I was actually in what they call "fintech" today, first modem in town, woo hoo. People now look back on it like it was a relatively difficult blip in time, but I assure you it was a slow-motion dumpster fire that outlasted Reagan.
Sooner or later, people can't afford anything any more anyway, consumers crater and interest rates skyrocket along with inflation since there's no carrot remaining and it's going to take a big stick to beat whatever's left out of a dead horse. Then off to the glue factory for the spent carcasses after that. Economic statistics can only apply to the cash flow that continues to occur, resulting in 100% survivor bias. Only those who have extremely good fortune and are relatively unscathed can judge when the devastation "ends", and "recovery" begins. That's the only financial signal that you've got, consumers would never notice on their own since no recovery ever has a realistic enough "upturn" for prices to actually come down or the lost purchasing power of the dollar to recover. At all.
When prices come down like they did at Walmart this week, anybody think that's a sign of recovery? After rising uncontrollably more so earlier this year than last, in order to catch up with the ongoing inflation that they previously hoped was slowing? When an increasing rate is so undeniable now that some non-positive indications eventually escape from BLS when it's already long structured to prevent downturns in sentiment? Which has really turned out to work when it papered over minor financial downturns, and when a little one snuck through they called it a "great" recession when it was a non-event by comparison to the real thing, and people believed it. Meanwhile it's no co-incidence that BLS looks to be slated for extreme cuts to transparency from here.
It's a familiar sign that financial malfeasance of Nixonian proportions is already underway. Lickety-split.
Ofc one can always say that No this is not the academic way to define inflation, but who cares?
Unfortunately amazon stopped providing order reports recently...
``` $ inflation -y 2021 -f items.csv 86 successful items, 30 failed items 2256.76 total 2021 2427.62 total now +170.86 (+7%) difference ```
The PPI is not a measure of consumer inflation. It's a leading indicator for it.
I don't know how this works in other countries, but in the US the weights do not change month to month like this. If consumers keep making this choice over a period of years the index will eventually get reweighted, but reweighting only happens once every few years.
(Of course, if you were an official put in charge specifically to cook the books you could just reweight on a monthly basis like you describe, which is something that might well happen now...)
(Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trumps-bls-pick-could-p...).
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...
So, just like in Venezuela, that number will be delivered.
http://emilysquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/EmilysQuo...
That said, I also think there is a good chance of that because we will be in a recession by then from the tariffs.
Only economists, policy makers, investors and people blabbing on the internet do care about stats.
Ordinary people just look at price tags; that's all they need.
But we'll never live in a place like that. We're stuck in the Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp world.
Democracy is a circus managed by the monkey cage.
"Feelings don't care about (your) facts." — not Ben Shapiro, https://www.amazon.com/Facts-Dont-Care-about-Feelings/dp/194...
"You don’t bring facts to a feelings fight." — Cole Christie, https://www.in8create.com/blog/herding-squirrels-ep-03-w-col...
Hence the joke: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2X93u3anTco&t=98s
Without solid numbers I wouldn't be surprised to see a shift to "assuming the worst case" and much more conservative and lower investment.
Straight to jail.
Inflation to low?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
How is that not newsworthy, but this is?
Food prices go up because of random weather events (or locus or disease). USA beef prices are skyrocketing because of some new disease for example.
Anyone who says that a monthly food price change is an underlying indicator of overall inflation is simply lying to you.
The main change is that the central bank dropped interest rates while inflation was already way above target (about twice the target inflation rate), and they did that to help the socialist party in govenment win the election, the problem is that dropping interest rates while inflation is already high and then while you still import more tax leeches results in a massive spike in inflation.
Unless you’re implying special credentials should be required to comment.
Nah.. “I’m an intellectual, I read tech blogs and listen to NPR… I’ve never made anything outside of a computer program, but listen to my opinion on tariffs that happens to align with all my media sources!”
It’s fine to call out overconfidence, but dismissing everyone as clueless is just another flavor of anti-intellectualism. The real intellectual honesty is admitting:
1. We’re all partial amateurs outside our domains.
2. Policy and trade affect everyone, not just specialists.
3. Listening and engaging beats sneering at “NPR readers.”
If you think most opinions here are shallow, good for you! You set the scene though, so maybe contributing depth instead of punching down?
It’s some lying, it’s some pretending, it’s crying, it’s some footstomping, it’s some complete bullshit. And every now and then small nuggets of facts are seen sometimes even intentionally.
Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900. Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.
Consumer debt is almost as much of a worry as government debt.
Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.
Your question at the end suggests those blogs and articles didn’t include compelling evidence for the case they were making. If true, then it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense to incorporate into your world view.
For instance your initial post seems to imply that we aren't balancing our defense vs social spending and are spending way too much on the former. However, that doesn't align with our current outlays. If you check out the latest US Treasury report the outlays for the current fiscal year shows $1314bn for Social Security, $841bn for interest payments on the debt, $823bn for medicare, $805bn for health, and $758bn for defense. The primary driver of debt in the future will be the entitlement programs and interest.
Of course the unfortunate reality is that most people do not have the time to learn about everything and do their own research so we will always rely on others to some extent for our information. The danger is when your world view fills in the gaps of knowledge you lack combined with the facts you believe you know taken from someone else who may be mistaken, misleading, or outright lying.
Also, I admit to getting much of my information from professor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist.
I took an online economics class from Wharton business school, specifically on the economics of globalization. Fascinating stuff.
Anecdotal, but as a hobby for the last 20 years, I enjoy comparing the coverage of major news and economics stories in USA vs. other countries.
You're likely referring to the fact that the pentagon can't pass an audit even though there have been requirements going back to the 90s. That's more about tracking where the money they spent is going as opposed to the total quantity of money they are spending though, i.e. the $800bn is "accurate" but some portion of it may have vanished due to bad accounting, corruption, waste, fraud, etc...
Having said that any accounting for an entity the size of the US government is non-trivial. The numbers I stated above are not the final numbers. Firstly because it's YTD but also because of the complexity in the accounting. We have decades of trend lines and a lot of public data on tax receipts, bond auctions, and the like to know that defense spending isn't drastically different than what is being reported though. If you have any analysis that concludes otherwise I would enjoy reading it.
If someone gave me $100, and I handled it without keeping track, that's $100 not accounted for. But we do know that I was given $100, and the money went somewhere we just don't know where. But it doesn't necessarily mean that this was shadow money outside of the larger picture budgets, people still know I was given $100. Its not like now there's somehow $200 spent because I was given $100 and I failed to account for $100.
So thinking about the $800B defense budget, if they fail to properly track $150B of that budget, that's another $150B added to that pile of unaccounted for money. But its not an extra $150B that got spent, its still a part of that $800B.
As you well know the government uses “hedonic adjustment” which is when they say a car in 2025 is so much better that a car in 1980 that higher prices should be reduced to reflect that better good.
A different model is that you need A car to participate in society so even if it’s better we just raised to the cost to exist.
Turns out, the US government is very demanding and stingy with its money for what it ultimately gets.
Calculation of CPI is deranged by the cherry picking of what they measure.
The dataset inclusions are publicly available: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/entry-level-ite...
There are many different measures of inflation. And they serve different purposes.
Core inflation, which I suspect is what you’re talking about when talking about removing “living necessities” is a measure used to try and understand long term stable inflation. Since oil and groceries tend to be extremely volatile, core inflation removes those items. No one is saying it’s the one holy measure of inflation. If you’re trying to understand how prices have changed for the consumer over a period of time it’s not a useful measure at all, so you don’t look at core inflation for that purpose.
You look at other measures.
Also, weights are indeed a complicated issue, but is it really surprising the weight of TVs may have increased over a period of time when owning a TV has gone from being a luxury to a necessity?
But anyways, if you don’t like the weights that are used, the underlying segment breakdown is available on the same webpage that contains the summarized calculated inflation figures. Feel free to look at the segment inflation itself.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/may/measuring...
Note, for example, only 2 of them even intend to measure price changes for individuals (CPI and PCEPI).
What mechanism was that done through? The census or Walmart data?
I don't think anyone has seen a staffed table outside a retail store labeled "CPI Survey". This feels like an important question.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cpi/
Every time I've seen someone talk about "real" inflation or unemployment they're just applying a different view on the same BLS data. Metrics like CPI or PPI are derived via a formula to create an indicator. A benchmark that should be apples to apples over a period of time. It's not meant to be comprehensive. But the comprehensive data is all there too.
> Participation in the Consumer Expenditure Survey is voluntary. However, when you participate, you are representing thousands of other households like yours. In order to be able to create quality statistics, we rely on the participation of those who are randomly selected.
i.e. Volunteer census data from self-reporters.
It is the census, but one step away from outright unreliable information. This doesn't engender confidence.
Americans, in aggregate, are one of the most monitored populations in the world^1. Financial institutions are painfully aware of the spending habits of Americans. I believe credit agency data, which is paired with monitoring bank accounts via social security tie-ins (that already exist), over census data. Integrate credit companies with social programs (like food cards) and you'll have a complete picture of the lowest brackets.
^1 China does better for specific demographics, but the rural populations are not tracked very well. I could also stand to be corrected for conditions in some very small countries.
Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own a home, is a component that has been quite inflationary, at least as far as recent memory goes. Or maybe those blogs were talking about some point a long time ago when that component pulled the US figures down (e.g. during the last housing crash)? What specific details did they give?
So just like a commenter below said, I haven't seen a single country where I spent any significant amount of time, where official inflation numbers were not seeing as a complete joke by the common folks. Everyone unanimously agreed the numbers are gamed in order to control public opinion.
I've also seen a lot of gaslighting from politicians with mental gymnastics on how the population is not poor but actually rich because "look how many (Asian made)washing machines you can buy with an average salary here today, while for previous generations this type of items was a luxury".
Yeah mate, my parent could barely afford a European made washing machine, but they could afford their own house at age 25-30, working jobs that required litte education. Must be all that avocado toast to blame.
The rationale is that most people (read: people over 50 or 60) live in houses they own, those spend 0 on rental, so if you calculate the average expenditure on rental, it's low. And buying houses counts as an "investment" so it's not included.
So basically what you say: totally gamed.
The short answer is that they're waiting on a harmonised EU wide system for that will include housing in some measure, but that has been taking longer than expected and they didn't want to change the system in Sweden before the new system was finished...
Quite frustrating given the massive increase in housing prices since '08. Would probably have been much lower with a higher interest rate.
It may impact inflation but you seem to be claiming debt is a component of inflation calculation, when inflation is little more than the change in prices.
Debt isn't a component of inflation calculation but they are related. During Covid the US government increased the deficit (not debt, the derivative of debt) by a trillion dollars (no partisan stuff here, Trump did it first and then Biden). The infusion of money into the economy was one of the drivers of inflation between 2021 and 2025. You may ask, where did the money come from? I don't know. The government "borrowed" it, but from whom I don't know. Money "invested" does not necessarily get into the economy, but money invested in treasury bond gets spend by the government and definitely ends up in the economy.
I would love to have time (get paid?) to sit around and develop useful economic models. All I ever see is people offering simple cause and effect relationships (like I did above) without showing anything close to what I would consider a reasonable model of the economy.
Downvotes on this are weird, it’s just basic math (the deficit bar in 2025 is way lower than the deficit bar in 2021). I get FoxNews thinking math is a liberal conspiracy, but not HN.
Although without COVID Trump was definitely still on track to have significantly raised the deficit since it was falling in most years under Obama compared to 2008/2009 (before COVID he grew the deficit significantly with his first round of tax cuts, just like he just did with the big beautiful bill), and it isn’t clear that Biden would have diverged from Obama without COVID around.
Interest on 37 trillion in US government debt as well as huge consumer debt certainly is a long (and short term?) drag on the economy, but I accept your point that I don’t understand the correlation.
I have a simplistic way of thinking about the economy: I tend to view things as being healthy or unhealthy to the economic well being of all people in my country. In general, hiding information from the public is not healthy. Look, this is just my opinion, but I believe that our government is in the business of hiding information from the public; the government (both political parties) exists in its present form to protect and nurture the special interests who pay them off one way or another.
I don't see how having financial problems would make this comparison invalid.
Gemini estimated 750 to 800 total military bases.
When you say China that is incredibly disingenuous. If we said Asia yeah sure and that is effectively Japan and Korea.
Now let’s think about it more in terms of major bases/complexes. We are looking at maybe 25 in and around Japan and 10 for Korea. Still not a small number but I think a very different mental picture than 900 bases mostly around China. Also worth nothing that’s probably around 80k people deployed in those two countries.
I think there is a lot of bias everywhere, and I thought that this sort of averages some of the noise away.
I think grandparent comments about what constitutes a military base vs. a facility are interesting. I was a defense contractor from 1974 to 1998, and it seemed like all the US bases I visited were very large, but some of the NATO bases I visited were much smaller. Sorry to be anecdotal here, just explaining my own experiences.
I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.
I don't know how old your mom is, but it wasn't that long ago that people only went to college if they had good reason to, not because they were told they "had to" under the "A diamond is forever"-style marketing campaign. That shift in mindset enabled colleges to charge basically whatever they want. That is not a product of inflation.
That still didn't mean the workers had to comply, though. What do you think would happen, with respect to employment, if nobody attained a college degree? Not much. "Welp, no more college graduates. I guess we'd better shut our business down." would be said by nobody. Hiring would carry on as usual (aside from the lines possibly being longer, there being no legal mechanism to cull applicants early). But colleges certainly took the opportunity to present that idea and the people bought it hook, line, and sinker.
I was referring to pre-engagement. Those coding tests are generally only given after an applicant has shown enough potential to give them the time of day.
Whereas employers with tens of thousands of resumes on their desk look for a way, as to not overwhelm the process, to throw most of them out before opening lines of communication with the person. That was "No degree, garbage it goes". But yes, now that everyone and their brother has a degree, this doesn't work so well nowadays, which is why employers are quickly moving back to not caring about degrees — as you observed with said coding tests trying to stand in as a replacement. But there was that time in even more recent history...
I also said "effectively". There are technically other ways, yes, but they aren't all that practical at scale which is why a degree was settled on as the de facto solution, at least during the time it was effective.
[1] Which also further perpetuates the idea of housing being an investment with said homeowner realizing a tidy return in that ability to charge more, which sees even more people wanting in on the action so that they too can make a fortune; lather, rinse, repeat.
Home ownership rate today is pretty much the same today as it was in the 1970s, its slightly higher.
Water is wet
You can't decide that official inflation figures are inaccurate based on a specific, outlier example, when the official figures are based on averages.
And yes, absolutely, $80k a year in tuition is a massive outlier. Average in-state university tuition is closer to $12k-13k/yr, before grants and scholarships. The extreme majority of US undergraduates aren't shelling out $80k/yr for tuition payments.
From an inflation adjusted perspective, I’d actually rather pay $80K now than to have had to pay $60K in 2016 when you graduated.
You also probably know that most students don’t pay full price due to sliding scales.
I suspect this is also bimodal as well. The top universities can charge this, but the bottom probably are struggling to survive.
University tuition is a known example of an extreme inflation outlier. The cause is also known: The availability of loan dollars and the laws preventing their discharge in bankruptcy.
Tuition figures are also misleading because almost nobody pays that number. The tuition number is the maximum possible amount someone could pay without financial assistance, but when you look at the numbers you would be surprised to see that often 80% or more of students have some financial assistance. At many universities now, students with families below certain income levels have tuition adjusted down to $0.
You can’t judge university prices by the number on the website any more.
This is why the defense budget is never cut. By anyone red or blue. It's a funnel of money that can be pointed at any location in the US and give a bunch of decent full benefits jobs.
Mind you, I'm a socialist, so like, I personally wish we could move a bunch of the "jobs program" stuff over so that instead of carriers, we get well-educated, fed, and cared-for children and good medical care for all, and stuff like that. And that if we want a certain number of aircraft carriers, we should just try to actually get that many carriers on purpose for the cost that building the carriers entails. Without also trying to do 10 million other things on top of it to the point that the carrier output is a side-effect.
But like, it's probably better than no carriers at all, which is how it's going for lots of other countries. So I guess that's something to hold on to.
22%. But operations also includes civilian salaries and procurement naturally includes the labor required to produce what was procured. I would assume that R&D also includes research grants and salaries.
Almost nothing that the DoD uses is made by the DoD. It's pretty much all 3rd party contractors, and those contractors handle paying their employees.
But the confusion is that somehow, money not spent on “salaries and compensation” doesn’t go to people. All of it goes to people.
Defense spending isn’t buying “defense”, it’s buying time and effort for people to focus on and produce defense related things. This is the root of the original post that defense spending is a jobs program.
That's just straight up false.
It goes to legal entities, some of which are people.
Companies aren't people mate, and neither are investment funds.
The money might still be managed by people, but that cannot be called salary, even if you're stretching the definition.
Would you agree if I reworded my statement to “ultimately, all money eventually flows to people, whether for their labor or due to their ownership of the entities receiving the money”?
So yes, all transactions can be linked be back to individuals, if you ignore all details and make some gigantic leaps of faith... But what's the insight?
Are we just doing philosophy like in ancient Greece?
It’s not an obvious stimulus for US citizens, and in fact taking resources that would benefit other US ventures.
Also, even if you're right, the "salaries and compensation" of anyone outside the U.S. are effectively NOT that, since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.
No, almost all of it would cover your labor.
What you are describing is winning the lottery, which isn't really useful since it is a rounding error of possible scenarios. A "Having a career is meaningless because you can just win the lotto instead" kind of scenario.
In reality you would be digging for ages in your yard to find a nugget of gold. If you went to a place with gold to dig, you would be a gold miner, and no, it's not easy money, go ask them.
That's debatable. Without the labor input the product doesn't exist as far as the market knows. However, if you want to discount the labor portion, which is an equally valid take, it remains that what was said was “salaries and compensation”. Any compensation you receive for giving up the gold in your possession was already recognized. As said earlier, the exchanged value doesn't go to God, it goes to people.
> since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.
You can certainly play a game of semantics here, but generally "job" in this type of context refers to any kind of economic role, not necessarily direct labor. "It is my job to provide gold to the world" doesn't imply that you are the one doing the actual extraction. The significance of "job programs" is in offering opportunity to derive an income, not to give opportunity to strain muscles.
If you don't think it makes sense to scale it by GDP (though I do), then in real terms it has gone through cycles since 1965, with definite periods of decrease, even though the overall trend is upward: https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r...
It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.
Stipulating that they don't get eaten by their bigger neighbors. We're going to miss the Pax Americana.
Win what exactly?
Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.
This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1].
> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.
How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example?
> Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.
Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually.
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.
I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me.
Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I would grant them the benefit of the doubt if English wasn’t their native language, but they’d identified as a US citizen elsewhere in the thread and their name strongly implies native speakership.
In the US, this conversational construction in this context is most reasonably interpreted as the second sentence completing the thought in the first.
If a manager asks an employee “how many dents are on the bumber?” A response of “I think the total number is close to 900”, that would be in reference to just the dents on the bumper, not all over the car.
Also, elsewhere in the thread, they’ve acknowledged they simply made the number up (by just repeating what a GPT said).
I’d grant that there is a bit of ambiguity, but insinuating an “insane claim” is jumping the gun on a misreading that should have been fairly obvious in light of the “insanity”.
“Many” could be dozens or hundreds or over half. It’s poorly phrased to the point of being meaningless.
> > I think our total number is close to 900.
Total in the world.
“” If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.””
I intended to say 900 in the entire world, but I corrected that in a comment to 750-900.
"balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc."
Spending does not equal outcomes. There doesn't need to be a spending balance, but there should be an outcomes balance. We can see this with school funding. There are some schools that are underfunded and underperform, but there are also schools with adequate funding that underperform lower funded schools. The implication that you are making is that we could fix things just by cutting back military spending. However, we are also leaders in some of the areas you mention already, such as R&D. The Pentagon fails their audits frequently and should be trimmed down in areas that it makes sense. However, just shifting that money to education isn't going to make that much of an impact.
Without linking the blogs or articles it’s hard to say much.
Inflation is a topic that attracts a lot of quackery. There are a lot of blogs and websites that go viral from time to time with claims that the “true” inflation number is dramatically higher.
There is a quick reality check you should run whenever you encounter these claims: Take the claimed inflation number over a period of time and calculate the net multiple. Then run a reality check on something like a $500,000 house or a $5 hamburger.
There’s one prolific website and author who claims the “true” inflation rate is some number like 11% going back decades. If you do the math, that means something purchased 50 years ago in 1975 would cost 185 times less. A $1,000,000 home today would have been $5,400 in 1975 and a $5 hamburger today would have been less than $0.03. Obviously these numbers don’t work, so you can discard the author’s claim.
Actual inflation numbers over long periods are very sensitive to small changes due to compounding. Even over a 10 year period. When you see someone claiming dramatically different results, run a quick math check.
Also be careful for the cherry pickers: They’ll identify one or two outlier year-over-year jumps (eggs during COVID, home prices during a housing rush, insurance prices in a city after a fire) and try to use those as their basis.
A lot of soda vending machines will sell a 20oz bottle of soda for ~$2.50. Were soda vending machines selling bottles of soda for $0.15 back then? No.
Gas station hot dogs are about $1.50 now.
Which is less than I’d have expected it to be, to be honest.
...about 2.45% per year. And I'd probably take a 2025 hotdog over a 1930 hotdog, there's been a lot of food safety regulations passed since.
I remember you could get two cheeseburgers for a dollar in the late 90s, so ~$0.50. The inflation rate for something to go from $0.50 to $1.79 that's a 4.5% inflation rate, still quite a way off from people's arguments of 10%. And for the QPC meal comparison, that's ~3.3%. Higher than 2% for sure, but its also a single restaurant comparison on a single item here where its highest cost component (beef patty) has experienced overall higher rates of inflation compared to most other things. A restaurant that many people feel has gone up in price more than expectations of the rest of prices.
Link for the $3 90's price for a QPC: https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years...
Its price goes up. "Price is what you pay, value is what you get"; houses do not increase in value over time.
Just not a very good comment in my view.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP0000EZ19M086NEST#
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SUUR0000SA0
I’m driving, it’s difficult to put them on the same chart and normalize. But they are very similar. There are differences in methodology (housing, healthcare) but those generally add a small amount to US inflation chained index vs HICP.
Being from Europe, I wish. But for now, it doesn't seem to be the case. Your military power basically allows you to bully Europe and many others, tell us what to buy and whom to buy it from, which is an enormous economic advantage. You just made our puny European leaders promise an enormous investment in the US defense industry in the moment where we would need to propel our own industry the most (it probably won't materialize, but still, we'll spend at least some of it because most of our leaders don't want to be in a bad standing with the US). You are also bullying us into signing contracts with inferior American suppliers rather than Huawei, among many other things. All of this happens mainly due to the US's disproportionate military power. Meanwhile, you can afford having a president who is borderline illiterate (and actually makes binding decisions) without the economy even meaningfully sinking (stocks at historical maximums).
So spending in the military seems to actually be a good choice, unfortunately.
Anecdotally, I was in SF once or twice a year for a few years before the pandemic, and it felt like mostly similar prices to Dublin (an expensive European city). I've also been back a few times since the pandemic, and it now feels somewhat more expensive than Dublin, but not dramatically. Which is about what you'd expect if the official inflation figures were broadly correct. Obviously this is super-anecdotal, mind you.