re: So did the fed really fix inflation or did the supply chain problem etc just fade out

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Prove it. What numbers showed we were in a recession?

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From NPR, we had two quarters of negative gdp growth. That is a recession as defined by all of my liberal professors in college and most textbooks. LINK

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This is the second consecutive quarter where the economy has contracted. ...
While two consecutive quarters of negative growth is often considered a recession, it's not an official definition.

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Zero shite made up. Just alternative fiction from the left like usual.

So to recap:

Trump claims biggest inauguration ever, ORENGE MAN BADDDDDEEEE!!!
Biden claims not a recession: OREANANGGEEE AMANANNNNNN BBBBBBAADDDDD!!!

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You cannot be that stupid to think inflation has gone down. Everything is still very expensive.

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The irony.

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THEY TOOK OUR JERBS!

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It is always so easy to spot the Progressive voters in threads like this. Such a logical, thought out response to one of the many issues they created. Now they mock their enemies (US Citizens) that actually work and pay taxes.

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rices are no longer going up 7% YOY. Your scenario would actually require deflation. And, if you think inflation is bad, which I very much do, deflation is way worse. Great Depression and Great Recession worse.

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Right.

Also, wages are now growing faster than core and headline inflation. Income is starting to catch up.

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Other than the TV telling you that inflation has been “fixed”, help me understand what makes you think it’s actually been fixed. I know it can’t be the prices you pay for literally everything you buy. I say that because if you look at the prices of everything you buy, you’d know inflation is still running rampant, and is in fact still sky high.

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Inflation is a rate of change.

Inflation could be literally zero and prices won’t be coming down.


Yall shite all over libs for trying to change the definition of recession but then turn around and try to change the definition of inflation in the next sentence lol.

How is it fixed? Even though I make more money, my purchasing power is still down. If I was dumb enough to only pay minimum payments on my house, I would end up paying 800k of interest on a 400k house. Only an absolute idiot would look at where we are at post Covid and think it's solved or okay.

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That said I thought for sure that was going to send us into a recession and it looks like we may have avoided that.

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We're not out of the woods yet, not even close.

Consumer credit card debt:


Credit card interest rates:


Credit card delinquency rate (still waiting on the Q4 number, but there's absolutely no reason to think it isn't higher than Q3):


You simply cannot pump trillions of extra dollars into the economy over the course of just a couple of months and not expect problems and you absolutely cannot expect some sort of "soft landing" (it's every bit as likely as the inflation has been "transitory").

Job numbers coming in hot in a high-inflation environment is not a good thing. Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods. Increasing jobs means more dollars moving around the economy as employers have to compete for workers by raising wages as well as increasing the amount of workers (meaning more people with more paychecks). In a normal scenario we could expect production to eventually rise to balance this out, but a big part of the issue is that the primary job growth is coming from government (which produces nothing) and travel/leisure (which is generally a luxury field, meaning it relies on non-luxury production being strong).

This extra government spending is a big problem. To quote JPow from last night's 60 Minutes interview:

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Jerome Powell: In the long run, the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path. The U.S. federal government's on an unsustainable fiscal path. And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy.

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In other words, this "recovery" or "soft landing" has largely been built on rapidly increasing consumer and federal debt. The longer interest rates and inflation remain high, the more it costs just to service that debt while still accruing more debt.

We're on an unsustainable path (because consumers and Congress seem hellbent to not sacrifice their current spending for future betterment) with no discernable route out of a collapse of some sort.

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That said, I am still not sure the rate hikes really did that much to curb inflation, and think it was more the covid money and supply disruption stopped.

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There were already supply chain issues pre-COVID (depending on industry), they just weren't noticeable at the consumer end yet. The world shutting down during COVID just exacerbated that problem enough that it became easily visible. Some of it has been resolved, some hasn't and some of it has just changed (look at the spike in prices for shipping containers, for example).

As to the curbing inflation issue, I don't think it's done as much as it needs to do (when looking at Real M1, the money supply is still multiples above of where it was just before COVID) and I think the way BLS computes inflation has some flaws (no weighting for most-purchased grocery items and double-dipping into rent with OER) which make inflation seem lower than what many consumers are experiencing. Core CPI (CPI minus food and energy) is still 3.9%, removing just energy pumps that up closer to 5% as the drop in energy prices is the brunt of what's got CPI down to where it is now.

The amount of interest rate hikes has definitely caused the rate of price increases to slow down. Prices are still going up. They are not increasing as fast as they were. The proof is the difference in prices from 2019-2022 and the difference from 2022-2024. Prices are increasing at a slower rate. That doesn't mean they are going down. They likely never will. Your comment about supply chain issues is valid, though. There are many connected factors.

Most are responding with emotion and false statements. No question that many things economically are worse for a lot of people. But we did not have a recession. We do not want deflation to occur.

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You cannot be that stupid to think inflation has gone down. Everything is still very expensive.

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Inflation is the rate of price growth. So when they say "inflation has dropped," what they are really saying is "the rate of price increases has dropped" (ie: price is still going up, just not as fast as before).

The media is largely to blame for this as they use "inflation" in a manner which can seem to imply that "inflation" can mean prices decreasing. When prices go through "deflation", that's when they actually go down (and it's usually a sign that the economy is in the shitter as it means supply has built up because fewer consumers have extra money to spend).