The worrying kink in this job openings, unemployment curve
axios.com
axios.com
If the administration pressures the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates, say, right before November 2026, then we lock in a stagflationary cycle. An initial stock rally then long-term bond yields rising on inflation fears. A weakening U.S. dollar, and a Federal Reserve that has no tools to fight inflation in the medium-term.
People love to bring up the gold chart and be like "what happened in the 1970s!". It wasn't ending the gold standard that was the problem. It was the endless deficit spending; if you want to get a handle on inflation you need current demand to match current production.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
Is this actually true? It might make sense at a surface level, but if you think a few steps further, you'd realize that that the price of "inflation tracking assets" (TIPS?) would eventually incorporate whatever inflation expectations that the market expects, thereby neutralizing any advantages it might have. Moreover there are deep markets for interest rate swaps/futures, so there's little need to pile into TIPS directly.
Also "inflation tracking" I should have written more as "inflation hedging" -- needn't be TIPS exactly.
Higher inflation raises the cost of not buying treasury and other asset classes. You're right that there may not much change in the general preference in treasuries vs other non-USD asset classes, but it makes all inflation hedging boats rise.
This should be obvious if you simplify the market to just USD and say bonds -- at 0% inflation the opportunity cost of not buying bonds is just the real bonds rate, whereas at 10% inflation the opportunity cost is going to approximate closer to 10+real rate. In the latter the pressure to buy bonds would be much higher. ( Of course Fed can buy treasuries with essentially money created from thin air so the opportunity cost analogy may break down for securities first purchased by the fed, which could spoil the presumption that treasury sales proportion of inflation hedging assets might not change much)
The deficit spending is the reason why we had to leave the gold standard. France, for example, sent a battleship to NYC to retrieve their gold. The US government realized that they could not give out gold for all the dollars that they spent, and went into default on that obligation. The gold standard could have kept the government honest. But they were given too much slack and they abused it to the point of having to break promises officially.
The Fed cannot actually destroy all the money that they created. But they could start by not printing any more. They won't do that but they theoretically could.
Yes, interest rates?
The central bank raises interest rates, until there are enough bankrupcies and unemployment rate reaches a high enough level, The economy cools down.
The nation has low inflation again.
Rinse out and repeat.
They do the direct opposite of bailing anyone out.
Now the US is different. The Biden administration decided that the best way to fight inflation was to invent a giant pile og money and hand it out.
Which heats up the economy and should raise inflation .
Biden did not invent quantitative easing.
Can you provide some references for your claim? IIRC, under Biden, inflation was stoked by the Covid stimulus(arguably necessary to avoid rapid deflation due to Covid, but probably kept for too long) and the Fed moved pretty decisively in the second half of the Biden presidency to raise interest rates rapidly to combat inflation. FWIW, the inflation issue seemed to be under control and heading in the right direction before the administration changed.
It authorised $891 billion in total spending – including $783 billion on energy and climate change, and three years of Affordable Care Act subsidies
in order to...... Reduce Inflation.
I think you answered your own question.
Even Arizona Iced Tea had to come off their $0.99 price tag.
Everyone in America is hard-pressed to find anything for sale for at or under $1.00
Minimum wage is still federally $7.25.
How much worse does it actually have to get to be official stagflation?
In my low cost of living region you’d be hard-pressed to find any entry level positions (fast food, retail) below $15/hour. Panera (which needs staff at 4 or 5 AM to prep food for the day) are starting at $20/hour. Local restaurants and grocery stores can and do lose employees when a corporate chain raises their rates, so they have to keep up.
We could eliminate the federal minimum wage and very little would change.
And only idiots think that removing the minimum wage will make things better, but they are idiots, so there's no helping them.
If you eliminated the federal minimum wage then many states would immediately remove it without a replacement and let their people starve to death in the gutters fighting with each other to get any income so that they didn't starve to death in the gutters while raking in the votes from the middle class business owners who are raking in the dough because they don't have to pay their employees any more.
If anything, we need to make the federal minimum wage not be a set minimum but instead it should change and vary based on the economic health of the city, state, and county that the worker works in, and it should be enough that any person who works a full time job earns enough money to afford 1/2 of a 2 bedroom apartment's average rent + food, insurance, car, gas, and fun.
That would give incentive to local businesses to keep their prices affordable because lower prices would mean lower wage costs and therefore more potential profit.
You're right here -- we need a complex, multivariate analysis to determine fair wages across regions that accounts for average and personal economic health, transportation costs, food costs, housing costs, difficulty of the work, and even the prestige of the job and the mood of the worker.
This determination should be updated frequently, ideally in real time, so that the prevailing wages don't fall behind reality.
Even if this determination is governing the wages around you, you should always be allowed to negotiate something better for yourself.
When wages are finally determined correctly, then every worker should be able to say "this job benefits me more than any other opportunity available".
The US distributes plenty of food to poor people. My neighbors on SNAP get significantly more fresh food than they can eat each week -- they just throw out about half of it. In the presence of social programs, changing the minimum wage will neither cause nor prevent starvation.
Most things you described is inflation, not stagflation. The point about the minimum wage is a red herring because virtually nobody gets paid the federal minimum wage. Moreover contrary to many people believe, inflation has not been outpacing wage growth in the US:
It's literally called consumer price index. Why would "debt" ever come into it? At best it's trying to move the goalposts from "prices are rising" to "consumers are worse off financially".
If inflation (or some other shock) caused growth to head towards 0 with unemployment going above ~4% I believe economists would say it was a stagflation try period
Thousands of people are getting laid off every week, prices are higher than they have ever been for most goods and services, and while unemployment is low, the number of jobs available per person looking for work is less than the number of people looking for work, the government is shut down for now, and there are promises/threats of more jobs and positions being cut before it opens back up.
Really walking the razors edge here, lol.
And a Big Mac meal at McDonald's is $8.00.
A couple of years ago my wife and I stopped there to get a meal on the road (there was really not much else to choose from) and when the total for the two of us was over $20 I actually did a double take and said "there must be some mistake, it's just two meals" but that was the cost. Haven't eaten there since.
They’re ready.
It's an annoyance similar to the people who like to whine and apply surcharges to credit card transactions.
Legal tender for all debts.
The point stands that, in my experience, $100 bills are an outlier in most of the US and will, at a minimum, invite additional scrutiny or simply be refused in many situations.
That’s not what that means
So yes, they could refuse the $100 and then sue me, at which point they'd have to take it. So you'd get a big clap for technically "winning" this argument but in possibly the dumbest way possible.
In practice, the reason why 'legal tender for all debts' is relevant is because it pretty much forces to take my $100 or go through an expensive process to just end up with the same result.
I used to be able to withdraw at least $500, now in a single transaction I can only withdraw $200 max. Given that inflation has gone so far the opposite direction, it's wild to me to see such low low maximum withdrawals.
Only time I pull out $20s is emergency money for gas station, since for whatever reason they won't take large bills.
Arizona Iced Tea price increases would be due to 50% aluminum tariffs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/business/arizon-iced-tea-... | https://archive.today/HOsps
> How much worse does it actually have to get to be official stagflation?
Steve Eisman: U.S. Consumers Are Collapsing: Cars, Credit, & the Chaos Ahead [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492807 - October 2025
* 69% of the US population are living paycheck to paycheck
* 25% of American consumers are using BNPL (buy now pay later) to pay for groceries
What breaks the camel's back? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is not out of any kind of financial necessity. It is a lifestyle choice.
Report: https://lisep.org/mql | https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63ba0d84fe573c7513595d6e/...
> One commonly used (though also criticized) benchmark for housing affordability is that no more than 30% of household income should go toward housing costs. Households that spend more than that are considered “cost burdened” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By that standard, 31.3% of American households were cost burdened in 2023, including 27.1% of households with a mortgage and 49.7% of households that rent, according to 1-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). (Many more people own than rent: In the second quarter of 2024, 65.6% of occupied housing units were owned while 34.4% were rented, according to the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at...
Americans are flush with income at the median and spend it on unnecessary luxury goods, as is their right. There really isn’t a way to argue around this fact.
The households that are paycheck to paycheck outside their own choice is much, much smaller. Including well-off households in the same category does a disservice to poorer households.
That being said, I don't think the term, "lifestyle choice" effectively communicates the reasoning behind this lifestyle standard.
The median US household has >$1,000 of income left over every month after all ordinary expenses per BLS. This has been the case for a long time. You can’t be living paycheck to paycheck in the sense of “having no money” if you can spend on luxury items in “necessary” categories and still have considerably money left over at the end of the month in the median case. That is the American reality.
Americans are astonishingly wealthy and they don’t even realize it.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/calendar-year/mean-item-share...
Congress is also still free to override the Fed and make their own programs or change the operation of the Fed too.
Everyone keeps saying this, but then go and re-elect the same do nothings.
I wouldn't count on being able to trust whatever they do, or don't, report for the time being.
https://economicprinciples.org/
https://www.amazon.com/How-Countries-Go-Broke-Principles-ebo...
The oversimplified explanation is that there's a money cycle that lasts ~80-120 years. We're going through the rough part of the cycle right now; and trying to fight it just prolongs it.
We saw similar during the great depression, in that people couldn't find full time work, so they did gig jobs, quickly undercutting other laborers until wages cratered and it was a full blown depression. I suspect that gig work, even 1 hour/week is enough to get you out of the unemployed group, but it isn't sufficient and is masking the true labor market and unemployment. And then there is the Federal government firing the statisticians because the numbers coming out don't look good and now we can't trust the numbers. At this point any number you must assume to be majorly inflated from reality. Those made up numbers aren't even good.
What are you talking about? Unemployment numbers have been gamed for years. Those job cuts from years ago didn't reflect in unemployment because the stats are fake.
>We saw similar during the great depression, in that people couldn't find full time work, so they did gig jobs, quickly undercutting other laborers until wages cratered and it was a full blown depression.
That is the wrong way to look at it. The depression did not result from low wages. Low wages were downstream of other calamities in the economy back then, chiefly a credit bubble and stock market bubble bursting as well as drought conditions and crop failures. Remember the Dust Bowl?
When the economy is suffering, money is (and should be) in short supply. There were naive efforts from the US government to try to set wages high. They even tried destroying food to drive prices up, until the many hungry people in the country became outraged about it. In the end they decided to debase the currency, thus stealing from everyone who had anything under the pretense of solving a problem. They made the problems worse, and probably prolonged the economic misery by years.
It is trending up but is still lower than pretty much any time since the 2008 recession: https://unemploymentdata.com/current-u6-unemployment-rate/
Millennials have spent most of their careers systematically underemployed.
https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/03/overview-o...
I recommend "Applied Panel Data Analysis for Economic and Social Surveys" by Hans-Jürgen Andreß, Katrin Golsch, Alexander W. Schmidt, if you would like to learn more.