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.
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.