Key Points
- As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
- Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
- Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
Retailers fear things that would help consumers consume? Sounds like retailers don’t know how to succeed without gouging.
The last time USA had extended deflation, the Great Depression happened. When people stop consuming, retailers fire their workers. Then fewer people can consume, so more people get fired. This goes on enough, then its not just stores who fire workers, but it trickles to factories, R&D, office workers, etc. etc. The longer deflation happens, the further it spreads and the more people lose their jobs.
Ever since the Great Depression happened, US Policy has been strongly anti-deflation. Our policy is to “err” on the side of slight inflation.
The cause of the great depression was overextended credit and stock market gambling. Deflation was present because people didn’t have as much money (or credit) to spend, but it was merely a symptom of an economic downturn, not the cause.
The cause of the great depression was overextended credit and stock market gambling
If the Great Depression happened during COVID19 (2020), then we’d still be in the middle of it today (2024) and wouldn’t really be out of it until 2028.
The Great Depression started in 1929. It was exacerbated by terrible economic policies and continued to get worse until 8 years better, when finally new policies kicked in and brought us out of it.
The Deflationary spiral was a big part of the extended depression and the multi-year effects. This deflationary spiral was stopped by making gold illegal, allowing the USA to float its currency more arbitrarily (ie: forcibly cause inflationary effects to counter-act the deflationary spiral).
Between 1930 and 1933, 30% of money was wiped out. That’s a deflationary spiral by any measure. As money became more expensive, everyone in debt (ie: credit cards today) would be worse.
If you owed $100 in 1930, you effectively owed $130 in 1933, because all money got more valuable ($100 in 1933 was like having $130 in 1930). Imagine if that happened today: that everyone’s student loan debts, mortgages, and other debts just suddenly became more valuable nominally. It’d be horrific and extend the problem.
We only got out of the great depression because of world war 2. Any policy pales in comparison. It was a huge government spending program that employed many. It also meant a lot of working age men died, shrinking the labor pool, thus putting upward pressure on wages. The generous social programs helped, as did the fact that US infrastructure wasn’t destroyed like it was in Europe.
Line go up….this quarter, or else.
Inflation is a funny word for “price gouging.”
Right?
Like… It’s not some great mystery. We see inflation at 5% and prices go up 8, 10…15%…and the companies say it’s because inflation.
Question for the economists in this thread. Everyone seems to be saying that a lack of at least some inflation is bad but also that wages going up to meet it is bad. Isn’t this a system automatically doomed to fail? Eventually in such a setup no one can afford anything and the economy collapses.
Inflation is fine as long as wages rise with it.
The issue is our economy is entirely built around low interest rates and low inflation. It’s been that way for a generation. This benefit asset-holders like home owners and the wealthy. Hence why they are doing everything possible to avoid wage-growth. They don’t care about inflation, what they are terrified of is wage growth and higher interest rates.
If wages rise together with inflation you get hyper inflation.
Inflation is easier to handle and not as bad for the economy as deflation, so that’s where we are always at.
They tighten their belts, we tighten our belts, everybody loses. All because they got to have all the money and never leave anything on the table for the working class.
Yall made your nut with pandemic price hikes, now eat your fuckin crow.
They won’t. They will continue to cut costs by skipping health and safety requirements and laying off employees. There must always be profit.
There must always be as much profit as possible no matter who suffers*
New challenges for retailers such as:
Not hitting record profits year after year. Reducing their CEO from a five yacht household to a four yacht household. Finding ways to hardline lobby to reduce taxes to zero.
It’s time to stop spending.
I’ve cut back on everything, not just because its expensive but because I want to send a message.
If even 10% did this, the corps would shit themselves bloody.
100% agree. I have personally stopped eating fast food months ago. The quality is the worst it has ever been and it is outrageously priced. Same goes for soda, chips, and other junk food. Junk food was supposed to be cheap. When you stop making it cheap…you don’t have a consumer base.
It is “insane” over here in the Netherlands also;
- MC donalds “standard” menu; ±/ 15 Euros (used to be around 8-10 euros)
- Dominos Pizza medium “special”; 15+ Euros (used to be around 10 euros for the same pizza)
It’s already close to a price hike of 50+ percent.
Went out to dinner with a few friends to a Korean BBQ place; 40 euros for all you can eat per person. It was nice but the amount of food that one should eat to get to the 40 euro treshhold is insane. I think I ate for a maximum of 15 euros of food.
Other places also aggressively jacked up their prices for the exact same menu and quality (or lack of). I just cannot be arsed anymore to eat out.
The new fastfood prices are getting closer to the restaurant prices pre inflation. I don’t see any incentive to actually pay those prices for the lack of quality of the food.
I also see that the same fastfood chains ‘quietly’ implemented shrinkflation in regards of toppings or portion sizes so one gets screwed over double.
I liked to get some fastfood once or twice every 2 weeks, but I just cannot be bothered anymore.
the kicker is that for that 15 euros worth of fastfood I can get close to a weeks of selfcooked dinner.
I already see some grocery stores actually lowering the prices of certain items and aggressively put items on huge discounts.
When’s the last time the US saw significant deflation? The 30’s? Can’t say I blame them for their fear. But they’ll see no sympathy from me! We’ve seen two whole generations born, raised, and passing away in the age of “Number always go up!” business. At least the greatest generation grew up hearing stories of difficult times when it was the unions and collectives that brought them through the darkness. I’m sure current business leadership has no clue how to face this. It’s passed out of living memory.
You can see the massive deflation happening in China right now as youth unemployment hits 25%.
No thanks. We don’t want that over here. Inflation is (and always will be) better than mass unemployment. If you want lower prices, open up our trade with others (IE: Import China’s goods since they’re suffering from deflation: we can benefit from those lower prices).
What are the root causes of that deflation though? I would posit the over extension of the Chinese economy in an effort to mimic “Number go up” results without the required fundamentals (see evergrande).
I see “inflation is good” parroted a lot, without much analysis as to why. I understand how continual inflation is a major driver of modern western economies, and those steering those economies require it to support current polocies and the general status quo. However, that being said, I fail to see how that makes it required for things to be “OK”.
The price of a raspberry “inflates” in the winter, and “deflates” when in season. The price of commodity consumer electronics is in a continual state of deflation, as new teohnology emerges. At the microcosm prices move in both directions frequently, and are just deemed adjustments. Why then, at the macro scale is a continual increase in pricing considered a sign of economic health?
You’re getting supply and demand confused with inflation.
Inflation is a rise in the general price of goods. One item changing price (like a Taylor swift concert ticket) isn’t inflation, especially peak pricing.
Explaining it is much more than a commet length, but ill try before my phone dies.
As gdp increase (better efficiency, more good sold, new markets, value add services) more people are employed to do this work. Unemployment falls when this exceeds the growth of a population from either new people entering the workforce or immigration and against retirement and death. Okuns law.
As Unemployment falls, inflation increases. Less people employers are fighting over means perks and wages increase, driving inflation and costs of production. Phillips curve relationship.
Effectively, economic growth results in inflation.
If I had more time, changing the OCR affects components of GDP, changing inflation through these methods. But there is alot that goes into the logic.
No thank you, we do not need China dumping their goods in our markets. Just look at the EV dumping going on in the EU.
Decoupling is why you see massive deflation and unemployment in China and part of the reason why you don’t see it in the USA. Opening our markets to them would doom many of our industries and drive up unemployment for our youth.
Agreed.
But China will try anyway. Some geopolitical moved are obvious.
TEMU is a symptom of this obvious policy for example
I thought the US loved free trade? Oh, only when it benefits the corporate masters, I see.
No, the US does not love free trade. The current global economic environment where anyone can trade anywhere was established during the twilight of WW2 during a meeting at Bretton Woods.
Historically Imperial powers would occupy the vanquished, dismantle their adversaries economic systems and make them vassal states. They would then close their systems to outside trade and reap the rewards.
There were two problems with that for the US, first it would take a large military to do this (and we did not want to field those armies long term), second it meant we would probably have to fight the Russians directly as they would want to become an imperial occupying force (which they did) and would probably try to compete with us (which they did).
Instead we decided to bribe the Europeans into fighting the Russians for us. Hence the current global order where anyone, can trade anywhere for anything. We backstopped freedom of the seas with our fleet. Opened our markets to trade and provide financial assistance to help rebuild Europe. In exchange the European powers subjected their foreign policy to us and agreed to fight the Russians.
Europe, Japan and the rest of the Western world embraced this new economic system and it became foundational to their economies. To the US this was just a security deal, yeah we opened our economy but we never fully invested our economy in it. Which is why you don’t see many regional free trade deals passed beyond NAFTA after the end of the Cold War. We prefer to negotiate bilaterally with individual nations. We rarely ever open our markets without major concessions from the other side. We are also becoming more and more insular and are slowly pulling away from the global order we created because for us it was always just a security pact and we really don’t need it in a post Russian/USSR world. There is no popular support for NATO or any of the other institutions we created. Trump is a brainless Russian meat puppet but he knows how to read a room and the US electorate aren’t enthusiastic about staying connected to the rest of the world and subsidizing the costs maintained the current order.
Yeah, I was being facetious and poking fun at the claim that the US is all about free trade. It’s the claimed reason any time the US makes an agreement to screw over local labor which they label as “not competitive” i.e. corporations don’t want to pay American wages but want to sell to the American market.
We have a collapsing climate, and no plan B, but yeah, this is what we should be focusing on right now…
