Another article telling us we're wrong to be pissed off about inflation and high prices. How about some more articles about wage stagnation, wage theft, and wealth inequality?
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Wage stagnation is good for business to fatten their bottom line and keep inflation in check. Wage theft? Employees are dedicated and provide companies with surplus labor. Wealth inequality? Everyone not in the 1% is just temporarily embarrassed.
- Some economist
“Although lower prices may seem like a good thing,’’ Banco de España, the Spanish central bank, says on its website, “deflation can in fact be highly damaging to the economy.’’ How so? Mainly because falling prices tend to discourage consumers from spending. Why buy now, after all, if you can purchase what you want — cars, furniture, appliances, vacations — at a lower price later?
We're not going to buy that stuff now anyway because it's too expensive you twits
The reality is that the economy’s health depends on steady consumer purchases. In the United States, household spending accounts for around 70% of the entire economy. If consumers were to pull back, en masse, to await lower prices, businesses would face intense pressure to cut prices even more to try to jump-start sales.
We can't pull back en masse on purchasing groceries
In the meantime, employers might have to lay off waves of employees or cut pay — or both.
They're already doing that! They've been doing that!
Exactly!
We’re not going to buy that stuff now anyway because it’s too expensive you twits
And when you have deflation, no one buys stuff, and everyone gets laid off. Then you have Great Depression Pt II. I don't mean 1-2% RIF, I mean things like entire industries shutting down, and millions of people out of work. Right now we have very, very low unemployment overall. At the height of the great depression, unemployment rates were around 25%. Right now, we're at about 4%. In 2020, at the worst of the pandemic, we briefly hit 15%. In the great depression, it was over a decade where it was all above 15%.
Lol, this is why hate I economists. Thanks for telling people they're wrong for wanting things to be more affordable rather than providing economic solutions to making things more affordable. It leaves less than desirable political solutions like Trump's fascism to step into the fray and offer something instead.
Wishing for deflation in a vacuum means reducing demand, which typically a sign of depression in the economy.
If you want to decrease prices without collapsing the economy, you are going to need significant government intervention. Fortune doesn't want to tout that as an option since their readers would likely be affected by higher taxes due to this.
"Economists" are to capitalism what the priest class was to the feathered serpent: professional assuagers whose job is to rationalize and justify human sacrifice.
It's probably the same economists that claimed the inflation was temporary, which would require deflation to also happen to be true...
I mean thought it was temporary. It wouldn't require deflation, just market forces to rebalance. I also didn't think corporations would go hog wild raising prices...soooo....yeah.
Love hearing "the economy demands you suffer"
The contradictions aren't just going to raise themselves!
Okay, so can I have higher wages to pay the higher prices?
"No that's inflation lol"
Hmm, wasn't the crash actually caused by the stock market crashing because of overvaluation? Kinda like how everything is being overvalued now to extract every last cent out of consumers?
Every time someone says "economy" I change it to "rich fucks" in my head and it works amazingly well. Lower prices are bad for ~~the economy~~ rich fucks. ~~The economy is~~ rich fucks are really strong right now. Inflation bolsters ~~the economy~~ rich fucks, this move would destroy the ~~economy~~ rich fucks...
I need a bit of dark humor like that in my life, so I don't feel too bad whenever I look at my bank statement...
Economists* are impressive for one reason only: their ability to talk while simultaneously sucking every billionaire’s dick at once.
*MOST economists.
Karl Marx was an economist.
I think you might be confusing economists with MBAs.
Economist don't care about you and me.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Who wouldn’t want to fire up a time machine and return to the days before the economy rocketed out of the pandemic recession and sent prices soaring?
But those incremental improvements are hardly enough to please the public, whose discontent over prices poses a risk to President Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
“Although lower prices may seem like a good thing,’’ Banco de España, the Spanish central bank, says on its website, “deflation can in fact be highly damaging to the economy.’’
If food or gasoline prices were to tumble, households would surely find it less painful to afford groceries or their commutes to work — as long as they remained employed.
But the exception was a doozy: From 1929-1933, U.S. economic output plummeted by a third, prices sank by a quarter and the unemployment rate shot up from 3% to a crushing 25%.
Those collapsing assets, in turn, can topple banks that hold crumbling investments or that made loans to struggling real estate developers and homebuyers.
The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The deflationary spiral:
- Falling prices discourage spending (or encourage waiting to spend)
- Companies get less income, so they cut costs, laying people off or forcing people to accept wage cuts
- Workers have less spending power
- Consumer spending falls, causing businesses to cut prices just to move existing inventory
- Repeat
Falling prices might sound nice in the abstract, but almost everybody has a job that depends on someone else's spending. If their spending drops enough, your job is in jeopardy. If you lose your job, then it doesn't really help you that prices have fallen.
