Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "This Just Confirmed Everything" video.

  1. You are confusing two different things. When they inflation is down, they are talking in aggregate terms that the pace of price increases has fallen. Because it's being seen in the aggregate, prices for individual goods and services will vary in how they respond. You don't buy a car daily, so you won't notice if those prices aren't rising as fast, or are even falling. But, you will notice it in your grocery shopping and your insurance costs. And depending on what you buy, your personal inflation might not be slowing or falling. So, your mileage will vary, and so will everyone else's. Inflation are like rats and mice. You may not see them, but you know when and where they're in your house. Suppliers set prices, and perhaps only two things force them to raise prices and that's Fear or Greed. And when it shifts from greed to fear, and the fear gets strong enough that's when unemployment starts creeping up. Shrinkflation - smaller package sizes for the same price - is a strategy used by suppliers when they know the consumer can't pay higher prices. So... Fear has been getting stronger for a while. Don't expect to see net price falls in consumer non-discretionary spending until things get really dire. Before that prices for discretionary spending will come down in price as demand for them shrinks. So car sales are down, luxury spending is down, takeout food spending is down, along with air travel and holiday spending. It's starting to hit the well-heeled, so the signs are there, but don't expect too many bargains right now.
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  2. Not necessarily. Inflation can be purely down to too much money in the system, but as most of it is Bank credit provided by banks making loans, and the banks aren't very many new loans, and are dumping loans off their books, where's the money coming from? There is not much credit to be had. So this is less about monetary policy, and more about supply issues due to offshore supply lines being more expensive, Services becoming more expensive due to demand and firms like insurers passing on increased costs to consumers. (climate change is real, bird flu killed poultry flocks that have to be replaced, and Healthcare costs can't shrink, sorry.) Interest rate hikes are performative, because they can't do anything about supply shocks, and hardly any of the "money printing" went directly to consumers. Most of it when to firms, and if that money had been lent to firms instead of being gifted, or taxed effectively, there wouldn't have been much inflation to think about.
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