- Post Raisin Bran goes from 2.50 to 3.00 per box at Walmart.
- My favorite yogurt goes from .50 to .58 each at Walmart.
- Cherry tomatoes go from 4.98 to 5.98 per package.
- Walnuts go from 9.98 to 13.98 per bag at Sam’s.
- Bottom round goes from 2.48 to 2.68 per pound at Sam’s.
What was once purchased for weekly meals at the supermarket for under $100, now exceeds $120. We have cut back on many items and we still pay more for our weekly food bill.
Econbrowser, however, tells us everything is coming up roses:
If the expectations hypothesis of the term structure (EHTS) holds, then these movements imply that as of 11/8, the average inflation rate over the next five years will be a breathtaking 1.6%!
Here is a free clue for Econbrowser: The tips market does not predict what the inflation rate will be. It predicts what the government will report the inflation rate to be – and indeed, the government is going to report near zero inflation during the next five years – because the government thinks you are stupid.
I’ve noticed a pushback from many econ bloggers against the now-evident inflation. The basic message of which is, “who are you going to believe, the official statistics or your own lying eyes?” I’m rather disappointed in some of these guys.
Apparently there has been a tangible decline in the prices of everything I don’t actually buy, offsetting the visible and painful increases in the prices of all the things I do buy. Sucks to be me!
All of our insurance rates went up this year. I don’t even want to think about what my health insurance increase is going to look like in March.
I also notice that supposedly radical and heterodox economics bloggers, such as Friedman and Bryan Caplan, even though they are not advocating the orthodoxy, are unwilling to buck it. Academia tolerates small heresy in small mattes, to fit its self image of tolerance, but there are limits, and these guys know where the limits are.
…and as an ag commodities trader, I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the true magnitude of the food inflation that’s coming! I’ve noticed this week that while come commodities that had been going parabolic (like sugar and cotton) have declined modestly from their recent stratospheric highs, just this week, some other ag commodities like livestock (cattle and to a slightly lesser degree, hogs) are reaching new highs day after day. Meat is going to soon be much more expensive (as if it wasn’t already). I may have to become a vegetarian soon, but only if I’m going to continue to eat. 🙂
My own perception of the lag time between ag commodity price levels and prices at the grocery stores is about six to nine months. That varies by commodity. (It’s much shorter in the crude oil to gasoline environment.) Many companies that buy ag commodities to hedge their input costs are buying grains between six months and 18 months out. Once those supplies are used up, even large corporations will be forced to increase prices substantially!
In some cases, I expect to see price increases of 50 to 80 percent! Grains especially are going to be impacted, and any product that uses them will increase substantially. Even baby diapers have corn in them!
And none of this even includes the potentially catastrophic impact of new energy legislation on ag products that the EPA promised us at Christmastime last year. The indirect land use provision alone will remove several tens of millions of U.S. farmland from production, and we still haven’t even mentioned higher oil prices and their impact on farm machinery use or fertilizer costs.
This new regulatory environment is still several months away, and the impact on food prices and availability won’t be seen for some time. But its impact will be immense! I dread that day! As a preview, however, the leading grain analyst in the US told me this past summer that this new regulation will “fundamentally transform” the US from the world’s leading producer of ag products, to a net IMPORTER of food within a few years’ time. Imagine the domestic and global implications of the world’s largest food producer being transformed into a food buyer! Where will it come from? How much will it cost? I shudder to think what’s coming!
sbenard wrote:
There is a widespread attitude among the ruling elite that capital and entrepreneurship is simply harmful. Whereas the old socialists believed that they should take over factories, replace entrepreneurship with central planning and private capital formation with government capital formation, the new progressive attitude is that they should just shut the evil factories down, stop the horrid evil of private capital formation, and forbid the oppressive evil of entrepreneurship.
Inflation’s a stupid Keynesian concept.
When the government pumps money into the economy it increases the demand on certain things (lorries, cement, paper, electricity, certain types of labour, etc.) and pushes those things into a bubble.
Food and (normal) clothing type goods aren’t much affected because the demand for loaves of bread isn’t much affected by the money creation process: people eat pretty much the same amount of bread regardless.
When food prices are rising, something else is going on.
(eg. Venezuela)
Nuts
Bread is the price of money, as money is the price of bread. Print more money, price of money in bread falls, hence the price of bread in money rises.
The problem in Venezuela is that the government promised its predominantly brownish voters lots of free stuff at the expense of the predominantly whitish people who failed to vote for it. It theoretically paid whites for their stuff by printing money, which paper they rapidly lost enthusiasm for, whereupon the bakery shut down.
The problem with Venezuela is that the government ran out of other people’s stuff, bread being among the things it ran out of.
Deleted because unresponsive. You don’t argue for Cultural Marxist economics (which is Marxist economics with the added insanity that Stalin suppressed) you ignore what I said and assume that everyone already knows Cultural Marxist economics is correct. Were I to allow your argument through, I would have to respond by restating my original standard conventional economics, which is, like arguments with 9/11 troofers, a waste of space, since the troofer will assume that everyone, including myself, agrees that building seven fell in free fall all at once, even after quoting my own words directly saying it fell like a tree, with the part notched by the axeman going first.
I will not allow stuff that purports to be arguing for something, but in place of argument and evidence for that thing, takes the frame that there is already a universal consensus on that thing. It is an illegitimate form of argument, claiming a false consensus.
I would love to debate Cultural Marxist economics, but you are unresponsive. Argue it, rather than assuming it and assuming everyone agrees with cultural marrxism, and I will let your comment through.
By the way, that take on Venezuela is pretty much what you’d get if you asked Hillary Clinton what happened too.
Noticeably absent is anything having to do with international sanctions and so on, which is hilarious given that you and Clinton are the ones who think trade between nations is so important.
A warmer take on Venezuela is that not only did they try the gibs-socialism trick but they also leveraged their natural resources literally hawking the future to temporarily make gibs-socialism possible. When they were suitably vulnerable the international élites that push egalitarianism/socialism every day of the week suddenly decided they were all about deregulation and free markets (which of course they are: both are mainstream Whig positions and both are logically consistent, sort of, at a push) and used the power of usury to turn the screws.
I’m not going to blame the international community for the problems arising from the big oil crash because the Venezuelans had only themselves to blame for being so levered up, but the way debt works is always and everywhere the same: they get to decide when you buy and sell, so if they want you to sell on the lows they just find a reason to call in the debts, and if they want you to borrow more to buy on the highs they find a reason to make you eligible.
The whole thing’s a disgusting confidence trick.
The crisis in Venezuela is standard socialism. They just plain ran out of other people’s stuff, and did so long before any international sanctions. Sanctions started in 2017. Venezuela shop shelves have been empty since 2014. People have been fleeing in huge numbers since 2014. The economic collapse and white flight started when oil was still well above $100 per barrel.
Millions of people, a major portion of the population have fled starvation and confiscatory violence, starvation and violence that they voted for and participated in, and are attempting to introduce into every country that they flee to.
Some time back, people discovered a major body of gold ore in Venezuela. From time to time, someone attempts to develop it. Every time, thugs from the government show up, expecting to find chests full of gold, and proceed to beat people up and destroy stuff in course of searching for evil capitalist gold. What happened to that mine is a microcosm of the entire Venezuelan economy. International gold miners keep showing up, government gives them mining rights, then someone from the government burns their stuff and cuts their fingers and toes off demanding gold, and then the miners run away. It is not international sanctions, its Cultural Marxist economics, that tells you and them that the government can suspend the laws of economics by command. When the command is mysteriously disobeyed, the government lashes out at anyone in the general vicinity, in this case, gold miners.
The government agrees to a perfectly reasonable, indeed extremely generous, mining agreement, miners show up. Not long after they show up, someone from the government comes around demanding gold.
When there is no gold, lashes out. As with gold, bread. You telling me that the laws of economics do not apply to bread, and I expect that if we discussed the gold mine, you would tell me the laws of economics do not apply to gold. Failure to get the outcomes you command is an evil capitalist plot, and the evil capitalists must be shut down.
Not working for bread, not working for gold.
This is the standard libertarian (not Austrian) line but it’s not true and it’s not even Austrian.
Laying Venezuela aside, because there’s no more to be said and readers can read for themselves what you’ve excluded and included and where you’ve digressed and make their own judgement of the merits of the case, let us focus solely on bread.
By what mechanism of HUMAN ACTION does the price of bread increase when the supply of money increases?
What I’m claiming is that it doesn’t, simple as that. If bread prices are rising, something else is causing it and it’s usually a deliberate policy, either of governments domestic and foreign, or of somebody else involved in the process. It is **never and nowhere** a monetary phenomenon.
Your strategy with me, and I assume with third positionists in general, is to insist over and over and over and over again that we’re social democrats, that our policy recommendations are those of Nicolas Maduro or Bernie Sanders. This cannot and will not stand and this record alone is sufficient to ‘clarify’ your ‘misunderstanding’: this is an Austrian account made from a position of ANTI-egalitarianism with the interests of the NATION in mind, not the interests of a subset of that nation such as ‘the workers’.
When governments increase the money supply, by seizing foreign gold, by diluting/cheapening the metals used in coins, or by issuing fiat bank-notes, this does indeed have an effect on prices because there are now more units of currency but no more ‘units of stuff’.
As an Austrian, my eyebrows are always raised by ‘units of stuff’ as a concept, and as an Austrian sympathetic to CLASSICAL economics, my eyebrows are also raised by ‘units of currency’: Cantillon was very clear about this – the gold received by miners is not the gold received by farm hands. As a matter of dogma, Austrians do not accept the principle of ‘this or that – I’m indifferent – they’re the same thing’, and this applies A FORTIORI to the principle applied across demonstrably different animals such as bread and money.
This aside, we generally concede that increasing the supply of money means that there are now more units of currency (with all their differences) than units of anything&everything ELSE (with all their obvious differences: the difference between plumbing insurance and champagne) and that this means that they (the unit of exchange generally used as one side of every transaction) are competing for fewer resources each, by definition.
This is, however, problematic. For example, if a new firm undergoes an IPO, there now exist additional shares competing for the money. If a new means of serving people comes onto the market (hand car washes spring to mind as a paradoxical, anti-modern ‘innovation’ but there are probably better examples: cam-girls maybe lol) these too compete for the money: all without requiring demand for existing HARD tangible resources.
These things can ‘soak up’ the new money, as we’ve in fact seen with QE ever since the 1990s. This is a driver (one of many) in globohomo, the consumption-driven society and so on.
But the relationship to bread is even stranger. The Cantillon effect describes the differences that accrue within a new commodity as it moves through the economy but there are hard limits, physical limits, immutable factors of life and FOOD is one of them: humans require a certain amount of energy to live and they get some of that by eating.
We’ve all seen fat people, and I assume nobody’s going to argue that this is an effect of QE, so let’s get that out of the way straight away.
A person’s consumption of bread does not change when the money they receive is diluted by being late receivers of its now-increased supply, and, crucially, it doesn’t change when the money they receive is EMPOWERED by being early receivers of its now-increased supply either: it makes no difference.
Prices bid up by new money rise because people are doing *more of it*, whether it’s buying stocks/bonds/houses or engaging in ‘high living’ such as moving house, upgrading homes, upscaling personal consumption or just going out to celebrate.
(One should not confuse the need to eat per se with dining in restaurants: inflation CAN impact restaurant prices in ways that it cannot impact grocery prices.)
Nobody buys additional loaves of bread when they get an overpaid government job to work on the latest Keynesian fiscal stimulus project and nobody buys additional loves of bread when their order books swell on the back of a cheap credit malinvestment bubble.
Austrians understand this but so-called Austro-Libertarians pretend they don’t.
The ‘economic right’ is basically a lying ideology designed to keep the workers from joining the right, and keep the right from siding with workers.
This blog is part of that problem.
> By what mechanism of HUMAN ACTION does the price of bread increase when the supply of money increases?
You are using a libertarian shibboleth incorrectly. You don’t know what human action is, and don’t care. You keep using the shibboleths of your hated enemies in order to appear to be one of us, but don’t sound anything like one of us. But I will answer, as if it was a serious question.
There is a Scrooge McDuck comic on this question, explaining inflation by human action (anthropomorphic duck action) in terms suitable for children. My explanation resembles that of the comic:
The government wants stuff, prints money to pretend to pay for it. Suddenly lots of people, especially those well connected to the government, have lots of money, some of which they spend on this and that, so pretty soon everyone has lots of money. Including the baker. But the supply of stuff that the baker can buy with money is unchanged. So what good is his customer’s money to him? He cannot buy flour with it, because the guy who grows wheat cannot buy stuff with it either. In the Scrooge McDuck comic, everyone, except Scrooge, stops working, because they now have immensely more money than they are likely to get by working. And pretty soon they are hungry, because no one has any food except Scrooge, who is charging a billion dollars for a loaf of bread.
The baker wants money so that he can spend it. But he is spending it on the same stuff as all the people who have money free from the government. They don’t want to work for the baker, or sell the baker stuff, because the government gives them far more money than the baker ever could. So the money the baker gets for his bread is of no use to him. Other people will not give him stuff for it, nor work for him for it. To continue operating as a baker, he is going to have to charge a million dollars a loaf of bread, because he will not be able to survive as a baker if the government only allows him to charge one hundred thousand dollars a loaf.
If the government limits the price of bread to one hundred thousand dollars a loaf of bread, he cannot survive, he cannot operate his bakery. He is going to stop baking, abandon his bakery, and do something else. Such as flee Venezuela.
In the comic, Scrooge McDuck loses that part of his fortune that is in the form of federal reserve dollars, in that it is inflated away, but gets it back again, with a lot more zeroes at the end.
Unresponsive.
A scripted response to matters that your script failed to cover.
Deleted because disagrees.
To be a commenter on this blog, one must adopt the same strategy as to be a commenter on The Guardian:
– agree with the premises of the article
– avoid saying certain things which are verboten
– agree with the sentiment of the article, or if you disagree, do so in ways which can easily be shown to be incorrect
What you do is insist on setting the frame of the discussion, and if the other side declines to accept your frame, they’re censored.
If they do accept your frame, the game’s loaded in your favour, at which point the discussion is about something other than what the person intended to discuss.
In this case, inflation-in-Venezuela becomes gold mining for some unknowable reason; inflation-in-‘the’-price-level becomes Marxism, for some unfathomable reason; the whole discussion becomes an end of term school test on ‘correct usage of the proper shibboleths’.
You’re a joke, and a Jew.
What happened to the gold mine explains why people are starving in Venezuela. The gold is not mined for the same reasons as bread is not baked: The government is trying to enforce your cultural Marxist economics, which is, as Stalin noticed, considerably nuttier than the old orthodox Marxist economics.
I don’t enforce my frame. I forbid the frame that “everyone knows” that Cultural Marxism is true, when even old type Marxists agree that it is evil and insane.
And Marxists, like Troofers, argue entirely by speaking as if everyone already agreed with their account of reality, rather than by providing evidence for their account of reality. So forbidding that frame pretty much forbids the entire Marxist arsenal. You presuppose that everyone agrees with you, that Moldbug agrees with you, that Trump agrees with you.
Not even Marx and Stalin agreed with you.
“You’re a joke, and a Jew.”
Calling people Jews is not going to win you any awards.
So your thesis now is that Venezuela has empty shelves because farmers are being subjected to the same terms as foreign gold mining corporations who want to strip mine swathes of the country?
This is bat-shit crazy tier nonsense.
Venezuela periodically has empty supermarket shelves, as indeed does Britain, and the luggenpresse JUMPS on it.
It people were starving in the way cucks like Stefan Molyneux claim, Maduro would not have won the last election by a landslide verified by independent observers hostile to his cause.
Nevertheless the inflation situation in Venezuela is real whereas the inflation situation in America is not real. Bread prices are not sky-rocketing in America.
This is exactly what I said you were doing: you frame the discussion as being about Venezuelan inflation and conflate arguments against American inflation being a real thing with some kind of argument that *Venezuela* has no inflation.
Venezuela does have bread price inflation, America does not.
Peppermint thinks it’s absurd to describe the above ‘strategic style’ as Jewish. I disagree. This is precisely how our Middle Eastern friends always proceed and they ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE censor those who notice and especially those who understand who’s doing what.
The terms offered to the gold miners were entirely reasonable, and arguably absurdly generous.
The problem rather is that cultural Marxist economics results in cultural Marxists acting destructively and disruptively. They expect wealth to magically materialize, and when it fails to do so, lash out destructively at those who are attempting to produce wealth, whether they be gold miners or bakers. Old type Marxists, though they erroneously failed to see the role of capital and entrepeneurship in creating wealth, at least understood that creating it was not trivial. They understood, as their modern successors fail to do, that it does not just magically appear from the secret stash.
The problem is that you, and they, are working from within a frame in which capitalists, rather than creating wealth, are somehow mysteriously siphoning it off through their obnoxious and excessive political power, whereupon Cultural Marxists, noticing that expected wealth is not there, lash out to stop the siphoning. You academics expect the gold to somehow be in chests, and the bread somehow to be on shelves, and when it is not, proceed to hurt people and break stuff. At least the old type Marxists understood that they would have to actually do something, the central plan, to get the gold from rock into chests and the bread from the seed. The new type Marxists think they can simply command gold in the chests and bread on the shelves. Which is what your argument on inflation amounts to.
“Your strategy with me, and I assume with third positionists in general, is to insist over and over and over and over again that we’re social democrats, that our policy recommendations are those of Nicolas Maduro or Bernie Sanders.”
Argentina under Peron and others proved that right wing socialism even barring foreign intervention or the like doesn’t work all that much better then left wing socialism. Maybe a little bit (because its not prone to Pol Pot spirals) but not all that much.
Right wing socialism, in so far as it is genuinely socialist, just is not right wing. It is always disorderly and entropic, always involves a bunch of holier than thou people knocking over the apple cart to grab those apples. The major advantage of right wing socialism as compared to left wing socialism is that you cannot knock over as many apple carts while shouting “Jew” as you can while shouting “kulak”.
Pharaoh thinks things will be a lot more orderly if he gets to decide everything.
Next morning there is a mountain of scrolls in his intray.
So he dumps the pile from his intray to his outtray. A horde of faceless bureaucrats fight over the scrolls in his outtray, for whosoever manages to grab one of the scrolls gets to exercise pharaoh’s full power in the pharaoh’s name, while the pharaoh does not in fact know the name or face of the bureaucrat who managed to grab that scroll from the outtray.
In due course the pharaoh or his sons are overthrown in the name of the people or the proletariat or some such – largely because the people or the proletariat or some such are a lot less capable of inconveniencing that faceless horde of bureaucrats.
Right wing socialism still tells others what to with what is theirs and still subjects everyone equally to the state where they should be in separate classes not envying each other. What city people call competitiveness is envy.
Is there any spiritual sin me and my people haven’t committed?
“By what mechanism of HUMAN ACTION does the price of bread increase when the supply of money increases?”
The price of money (measured in bread) falls because of its increased supply.
Unresponsive and repetitious. You said that twice already in almost the same words, and we replied four times, the last reply being almost the same words.
Empirical data: what are the prices of your 2010 benchmarks as of 2018!
I am a busy man. Presumably while Obama was in power, the government continued to lie about inflation. Now that Trump is in power, will tell the truth, because the lie helped Obama and the truth harms Trump.
Too busy circumcising people for the Volcano God no doubt.
Fine I’ve got time.
Your blog post was 2010. This is the end of 2018.
Item by item, and if I can’t find high quality data I’ll say so.
1. “Post Raisin Bran goes from 2.50 to 3.00 per box at Walmart.”
https://www.walmart.com/ip/3-Pack-Post-Raisin-Bran-Whole-Grain-Breakfast-Cereal-25-Oz/661870514
$9.36 for three packs. You didn’t give weights so I have no idea whether there’s ‘shrinkflation’ going on or not. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Postulated inflation rate per annum: 0.5%. Bear in mind the federal minimum wage has stayed flat for that period so this rise isn’t due to labour costs going up. Fuel has been all over the spectrum so given the extensive malinvestment bubble of the period, my guess is distribution costs but there could also be regulatory considerations.
Verdict: not much inflation.
2. “my favourite yoghurt” – insufficient data but I do see four packs for $3 so it’s quite possible these have gone up. If this apples-to-oranges comparison is the right one then the annualised rate is as much as 3.4% (ooooooooooh, right!)
3. “cherry tomatoes per package” – insufficient data and annoyingly Walmart won’t specify prices for items it won’t deliver.
4. I assume Sam’s is a chain of convenience stores, something analogous to ‘Mace’ or ‘Premier’ in the UK. I have no clue. Again insufficient data for “walnuts, per bag” but the nearest priced one would be this: https://www.samsclub.com/sams/mm-walnuts-3-lbs/prod22160277.ip?xid=plp_product_1_1 $11.98, so it’s actually gone down. Now that could be because the raw product is somewhat volatile due to the weather, but either way it’s not exactly a Doomsday scenario for inflation rates. At best, an annualised rate of near zero, and I’m not about to crunch the numbers to estimate the impact of the weather.
5. $2.53. It’s also gone down at Sam’s.
https://www.eatlikenoone.com/price-guide-to-buying-beef-at-sams-club.htm
Not 100% clear whether that’s 2014 or 2018 but either way it’s lower than 2010.
There has not been widespread food price inflation in the past decade, because people aren’t demanding more food than they were previously.
Only a Keynesian who can’t tell the difference between different types of good would make such a stupid mistake as to try to map the money supply onto food prices.
What this suggests is that food prices have been rising at roughly three percent per year since 2010 – as compared to official data telling us that food was getting substantially cheaper during the Obama years, while everything we were actually paying serious money for, healthcare, education, and housing, was skyrocketing.
Which is consistent with reactionary economics, right libertarian economics, and the reactionary account of the Obama years. The reactionary account of Obama economics being that Obama was running out of other people’s money.
Inflation and the debt to GDP ratio soared during the Obama years, in part because taxes on the rich were well above the Laffer maximum, reaching debt to GDP levels that would be dangerous if America was not an empire that could force other nations to accept its paper at gunpoint. Inflation and the debt to GDP ratio stabilized as a result of the Trump tax cuts.
[*deleted*]
You already said that.
Unresponsive.
Make an arguments, and I will allow your comments through. Repeat yourself and I will stop allowing comments that repeat the same argument over and over again through.
Assume a frame where everyone agrees with cultural Marxism, instead of actually arguing for cultural Marxism, like a troofer who keeps assuming that building seven suddenly and completely went into free fall for no apparent reason, rather than providing evidence and argument about when it started to free fall, and I am definitely going to censor it, because not a valid form of argument.
CR!
I have an exquisitely pleasant surprise for you.
You know how in videos games there are these things called “Easter Eggs”? Why, of course you do.
Well, since you bitterly despise Jim’s current blog description (“Liberty in an unfree world”), I’ve got here a lil’ trick you might enjoy using.
Go to the Wayback Machine:
https://archive.org/web/
And visit Jim’s blog as it appeared in 2005 or 2006.
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
https://web.archive.org/web/20070205004134/https://blog.reaction.la:80/?postid=78
Hot take!
Heh. I think it proves that with an open mind, and with willingness and desire to “study everything,” everyone eventually arrives at far hard-right conclusions. As Anglin says about himself, “You can’t fault someone for not being born with the right answers.” Diligence is required.
In Gil-Galad’s Elvish kingdom, everyone gets 1 coin a day, which they use to buy 1 square of Lembas bread.
One day the government decided to raise everyone’s salary to 2 coins.
Since the elves are as virtuous as they are intelligent, there isn’t a run on bread, since there’s no damnable gluttony.
If only we men were so pure of heart, but our kings used their Rings of Power to become Sauron’s icy undead.
There’s a reason your beliefs are high status, a reason proles don’t share them, and there are multiple possible reasons for you to believe them. I’m not sure how to ask you why, I’m not sure I know why I have my beliefs either. I think I want to save our people, impress the smart fraction who have changed my beliefs, have a meaningful marriage, and raise the status of my profession.
My biggest question in my most recent conversion is, can discussing moral philosophy be an evil act?
Inflation really doesn’t exist in the same sense that voltage doesn’t. It doesn’t matter if ground is 0 or 100 volts if every voltage is specified as ground+V. It’s really true that something else is going on when the bread moves from the bakers to the undeserving poor, specifically, what Jim said.
Note that comparing inflation to a gague transformation implicitly assumes the exchange theory of value, not the labor theory, but if labor theory was true, labor:money and money:bread would have to converge to labor:bread, which sounds like exchange theory.
(if I have intellectual and spiritual reasons for putting my faith on a card in my wallet and praying, you should also have spiritual and intellectual reasons for your beliefs?)