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Perhaps the issue is clouded by using money as a measure of economic health.
The amount of circulating money tokens is no measure of prosperity.
(Apr 2024 : 2.7 trillion dollar bills)
In fact, the money supply never keeps proportional to the marketplace of goods and services, and always lags. That throttles trade.
Prosperity is based on prodigious production of surplus usable goods and services, equitably traded and enjoyed.
Based on that, things ARE getting bad. Cash flush folks might be able to ignore things, but the po' folk are having a bad time.
As inflation drives up prices, the cash flow looks "healthy" but the buying power looks "sick."
. . .
FWIW the CONgress is borrowing MORE money than it pays in debt service. In other words, it's paying OLD investors with NEW investor funds. That's a crime in the private sector.
. . .
One remedy is to barter. Then it doesn't matter if there is a money token drought or not.
I hear sales are all the way down from TV manufactures, smartphones, computers, tablets and entertainment systems are all down.
How bad is the economy that sales are way down?
Perhaps the previous generation of tech items hit a good enough stage of development. The consumer is waiting for some advance to upgrade a perfectly acceptable system.
If you're an early boomer with a paid off house and a big 401K balance, life is sweet! Spend baby spend!
If you're a millennial or gen Z, your college loan payments just returned, your rent is soaring, your morning "coffee' at Starbucks and your lunch at Chick-fil-A, and the cost to fill up your not yet paid for truck has zoomed out of sight. And your credit card interest rate doubled!
You're screwed, angry, depressed, and you post about it continuously.
Yes, it did because the economy couldn't function with a deadly disease out there that killed over a million Americans in about twenty months. The alternative was we could all keep working and everyone could get sick. They estimate if we had done that that another 3,000,000 people would have died.
Can you post a citation for that 3,000,000 estimate?
Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359
Inflation is a problem, but its nothing like it was when I was young. During the 1970's it was frequently above 5%. In 1978-1979 it hit double digit levels. I believe it was 14% at the time. The 3.4% inflation we currently have doesn't compare with that.
You do realize that in 1983 the BLS changed how they calculate inflation. The official inflation measure used to take home prices and mortgage interest payments into account. If we measured inflation as the BLS did in the 1970s, the recent bout of inflation would have been even higher than the worst of the 1970s! It really is as bad now as it was then. Using the old measurement method, inflation would have peaked at nearly 18 percent in late 2022.
The main difference is that the old measure counts the price and interest rate you have to pay to buy a new house as the cost of the house, while the new measure is based on what it costs to rent a house. You can see that the new and old methods are the same in the initial run-up of inflation starting in 2021, but then the synthetic old measure shoots up when the Fed raised interest rates, while rents did not rise so quickly.
Last edited by moguldreamer; 05-19-2024 at 10:06 AM..
You do realize that in 1983 the BLS changed how they calculate inflation. The official inflation measure used to take home prices and mortgage interest payments into account. If it still did, inflation would have peaked at nearly 18 percent in late 2022:.
For some reason they just removed Coffee a product almost everyone uses from their calculation.
Apparently it had gone up too high in the last few years.
Ha. My brother paid cash for his truck. (No idea if my GF did.)
I always charge my purchases as I get reward points. As does my sister. And we both pay balances in full. Always have. So yes - cash.
Oh - I forgot - my sister just had her basement finished out. I think about 60k. And yes, cash.
I think that way things are now is just going to be pretty close to the-new-normal...........glum.
Just like when the so-called Great-Recession hit, money was flooded into the mortgage-markets, stopping cold the last significant, sustained correction in home-prices.
That same ruinous dynamic has basically been playing-out with the most recent helicopter-money-flinging, sending prices up and up and up due to inflation. And guess what, those prices are not coming down, even if inflation goes to zero.
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