If you think corporate greed is playing a major role in the current inflation then you need to rethink a lot of your views.
1. FISCAL MULTIPLIERS. Fiscal stimulus is less effective than you thought because it will go more into prices/profits than quantities.
2. INCIDENCE ANALYSIS OF FISCAL TRANSFERS. Distributional tables that show the stimulus checks going to households, for example, not correctly reflect that much of the benefit of the stimulus checks was captured by higher prices instead of higher purchasing power.
3. WORKER POWER AND REAL WAGES. If stronger demand raised the ability of corporations to do unfair or unjustified price increases over and above their costs then the flip side is you are saying that heating the economy lowers real wages.
(All of the above assumed that corporate greed was increased by high demand relative to supply, if it was just an exogenous increase in corporate greed—companies that could have done this in 2019 but mistakenly didn’t—the points would be slightly different.)
Oh, and I’m not updating my views on these topics because I think inflation is the result of demand and supply imbalances not changes in corporate greed.
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It has now, for better or worse, been effectively abolished.
The last three legislated increases in the minimum wage were bipartisan:
1989: President Bush (41) and a Democratic Congress
1996: President Clinton and a Republican Congress
2007: President Bush (43) and a Democratic Congress
Prices are up about 50% since it was increased to $7.25/hr in 2009.
As a result the inflation-adjusted minimum wage is about the lowest it has ever been. The productivity-adjusted min wage is the lowest it has ever been.
Only 1% of workers nationwide are paid at or below that.
The most helpful visualization of the persistent and, to some degree, resurgence of core inflation is this. Four straight months of strong core goods inflation largely due to tariffs. Plus services inflation remains reasonably strong.
A big upward revision for GDP, was a 3.8% annual rate (up from 3.0% in the advance estimate). For H1 GDP up at a 1.6% annual rate.
The biggest change was consumption which was 2.5% annual rate (up from 1.4% in the advance). Business fixed investment strong, residential weak.
Here is quarterly consumer spending. It looked like it was really slowing but with this upward revision and the July and August indications it's looking much more healthy.
Business fixed investment has been strong. It is unclear how much of this is pulling forward of capital equipment imports to get ahead of tariffs and how much is sustainable. (Note disaggregating structures have been falling while equipment is rising, reducing a disconnect.)
The problem recently has been in both goods and services. Core goods inflation has typically been about zero but in the run-up to this year had deflation. Now tariff-driven inflation.
And at the same time core services inflation has picked up.
A market slowdown in the pace of job gains, with 22K added in August, bringing the three month average to 29K.
On a percentage basis have not seen job growth this slow outside of recessionary periods in more than sixty years.
The unemployment rate rose from 4.2% to 4.3% (unrounded was a smaller increase).
Wage growth was strong and average hours steady.
All of these are consistent with a marked slowdown in labor supply (due to immigration policy) combined with a continued slight softness in labor demand (as evidenced by the unemployment rate which has been steadily rising at about 0.03 percentage point per month for 2-1/2 years.
But two reasons to be less worried than headline: (1) transitory tariffs & (2) some of this is imputed from rising stock market.
Here are the full set of numbers I'll talk about.
Particularly notable is how much lower market core has been than overall core at every horizon. Note regular core includes imputed items, notably portfolio management fees where the price goes up when the stock market goes up.
Market core is both better predicted by slack and a better predictor of future inflation. It has moved sideways this year. But given that tariffs are (hopefully temporarily) pushing inflation up that suggests that underlying inflation is going down.