This is what the prelude to stagflation looks like - no job growth, yet prices rising.
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.
Federal Reserve has no real tools to fight inflation. They can get the buckets out and start bailing but until somebody plugs the whole in the deficit there's a structural problem with the boat.
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.
The federal reserve buys deficit creating treasury securities, with newly created unbacked money. It's hard to separate deficit spending from the federal reserve and unbacked currency.
That might be true during the pandemic but it's been over for years now. The fed is moving in the opposite direction, selling bonds it previously bought.
Good point; fed also creates buyers of treasury securities, including ones it holds, through inflationary policies that pressure dollar holders further in the direction of buying inflation tracking assets (which the government is happy to swoop in and offer the ~most stable one -- allowing them to satisfy the market they create.)
>through inflationary policies that pressure dollar holders further in the direction of buying inflation tracking assets.
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.
High inflation pressures a near time preference in discharging USD.
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)
>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.
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.
If they let interest rates go high, the government will go bankrupt along with many companies and individuals. We can't afford 20% base rates anymore. The economy is not healthy enough for that. At least I don't think anyone is ready for the shitstorm that would unleash...
No, they don't. If the debt cannot be afforded, they should default. Start by balancing the budget. This inflation will probably ruin us. Kicking the can down the road makes the reckoning worse. It's not fixing shit, and it is causing way more problems.
Logically, sure, but Japan has been our aspirational model since things went sideways in 2020. Illogically, even the UK is paying back interest on the South Sea company from 400 years ago. Debt isn't going anywhere even after everyone who accrued it is long dead and dust.
> The Biden administration decided that the best way to fight inflation was to invent a giant pile og money and hand it out
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.
> 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)
Regrettably, everyone more or less memory-holed this. Biden is held responsible for all the bad things that happened because of COVID, and Trump escapes any blame whatsoever despite, yknow, advocating for bleach injections or whatever that was.
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.
1.1% of workers earn federal minimum wage or less, roughly 900,000 people.
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.
> 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
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".
Count me as an idiot, then. The minimum wage is a bad way to help the low skilled (it's actually bad for them because it makes it harder for them to find a job). Other safety net policies such as tax credits or direct subsidy would be much better.
> many states would immediately remove it without a replacement and let their people starve to death
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.
>I think we're already in stagflation but no one wants to be the person who calls it.
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:
I seem to recall that there are lots of criticism around the CPI these days, in part because it does not take into account debt. I don't remember the specifics, but I remember reading that if you do take debt into account, things look much worse.
>I seem to recall that there are lots of criticism around the CPI these days, in part because it does not take into account debt.
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".
I mean that I've read a few articles claiming that using CPI as the metric for inflation is plainly wrong. I'm not an economist, can't comment any further.
Stagflation is inflation+low (or -ve) growth + higher unemployment.
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
Stagflation is the simultaneous appearance in an economy of slow growth, high unemployment, and rising prices.
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.
LOL. I rarely eat there, just saw that $8.00 price advertised here maybe it's a special offer.
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.
Are $100 bills really transactional currency in much of the US? I carry a few traveling internationally but I'd never count on being able to use one at a US convenience store and I'm guessing there would be some friction even at a chain store.
I transitioned to mostly cash. 50's are the new 20, 100's are the new 50. I rarely have an issue with a $100 bill, but I don't pay for a $3 cup of coffee with it either.
It's an annoyance similar to the people who like to whine and apply surcharges to credit card transactions.
That's probably an exception. I'd never depend on being able to use a $100 bill in general. In Massachusetts, I've actually had to do some chasing down of $100 bills as trip reserve money. Not sure I could get anything larger than a $20 from a major bank's ATM. But I guess we're an impoverished state.
Well, yes. We'll risk the $100 bill vs. not being paid at all.
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.
If you insist, they could take me to court for not paying the bill, at which time they'd have to accept USD for the debt.
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.
Not sure about you but in my area it's only true in the sense that new ATMs can dispense more bill types. They can also now dispense $5 and $10, where previously they only dispensed $20 and $50. I haven't seen any machines that only dispensed $20/$100, or $50/$100 for instance. The implication that they're preparing for some hyperinflationary event is therefore totally unfounded.
I'm pretty freaked out that ATM limits around me have dropped and dropped what can be withdrawn.
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.
> 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.)
The bottom line is that BLS statistics, backed up by Federal Reserve studies, show that the median American household has >$1,000 per month in excess income after all ordinary expenses without regard for the necessity of the expenses in the “ordinary” category. In Federal Reserve studies that probed this more deeply, the truly “paycheck to paycheck” population in the sense that most people understand it was 10-15% of the population. That is still a substantial number of households but far below the misleading 69% figure thrown about.
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.
I think there's a lack of financial education in a lot of cases. There are two axis, dumb with money vs smart with money, and rich and poor. These form four quadrants. There are people in each of those quadrants. It's the poor and dumb with money quadrant that's most painful to see. CalebHammer on YouTube helps people to see how their choices result in them drowning in debt.
The BLS maintains a model of “ordinary expenses”, which includes every category of expenditure that most American households spend money on. It isn’t based on necessity i.e. transportation is an “ordinary” expense and so buying an expensive BMW is considered “ordinary” under this model. The category of ordinary expenses is expansive.
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.
I couldn't find any publications when searching for "bls ordinary expenses" and google's AI says you probably meant "Consumer Expenditure Surveys". However after looking at some of the data, I'm not sure it's as rosy as you make it out to be. For instance if you look at consumer expenditures by income[1], you see that the average across all consumer units is $87.9k of post-tax income against $77.3k of "average annual expenditures". That sounds okay until you look at some of the lower income groups. The $50k-69k group has $56.5k of post-tax income against $59.5k of expenses, which implies they're getting into debt to finance their lifestyle. That's true for every income group under $69k.
It isn't the Fed's job to fight economic problems, Congress is responsible to do that. But Congress doesn't want to legislate where they need to. Yes stagflation is the best outcome in the current climate. I don't think we'll have it that good.
The Fed was created to do that work for Congress free of the short term pressures of needing to get reelected and to have people who are actually at least trained in economics making those decisions instead of a random grab bag of people able to win our popularity contest elections.
Congress is also still free to override the Fed and make their own programs or change the operation of the Fed too.
I think part of the current problem is that "everyone" elected a bunch of "do somethings" with what seems to be low collective civic education, way too many sledgehammers, and "new" economic ideas like retrying the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act near to its Centennial Anniversary (and to certain other related key anniversaries of the Great Depression).
Prelude? Have you been asleep for the past 5 years, or 20? We've had plenty of inflation with little/no real growth. Number goes up but jobs/salaries/domestic production goes down. Government consumption goes up year after year.
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.
Maybe there's also the secondary cluster below that where even lower job opening numbers have the same unemployment rates. I think this graph is less predictive than just showing the relationship without other important data to explain why things like that second cluster below the main line exists.
Basically, with all the job cuts in the last few years, there hasn't been as much unemployment. We are currently heading to the point where even small job cuts have a much larger impact on unemployment.
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.
>Basically, with all the job cuts in the last few years, there hasn't been as much unemployment. We are currently heading to the point where even small job cuts have a much larger impact on unemployment.
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.
...what makes you think the sampling process is equipped to detect it? After all, you'd have to get off your ass and go hunt down the actual people in question, and then you might actuallyy get a politically inconvenient picture of the world.
Yes, that is how the Current Population Survey works. The US Census Bureau is very good at its job, when it is allowed to do it.
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.
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.