Ecriture d'adulte, would you admit, even if you don't think that the CPI is wrong, that there could theoretically be a government incentive based on the rise in pay for social security, veteran's benefits and many other such government entitlement programs pegged to the CPI, to report a lower CPI than is accurate to lower the effective pay to these mega branches of government?

Keep in mind that at no point in your admission of the above being true are you also admitting that the CPI is anything but the gold standard of truth.

I would think there would be more pressure from politicians to give out larger social security checks to keep that segment of the voting base happy. But the government is a gigantic institution made up of 10s of thousands of people that can have very different motives on particular things.

My wife has a much clearer financial motive to kill me, but the fact that I'm still alive is a pretty good defense if someone accused her of doing it.

Will you admit that it's quite shocking that the best methods for calculating prices, that very easily caught governments in Argentina, Brazil etc lying about inflation have confirmed CPI is accurate given the US government is always substantially understating it?

I agree with you CPI hasn't understated by that much over a long period of time.

But what has gone up higher than the CPI? All the **** you need basically, hence why people think inflation overall is higher than it is

education, healthcare, housing in a good school district, etc

As far as inflation today, GL to the next politician that tries to run on A. understating it and B. it is transitory

I’m not a US expert for that time but :
1940-50 , 90% of the US population was white …
1940-50, already the woman were representing 30-35% of the work force .

A big reason based on discrimination ?

Here some reasons that come to mind for me .
- The peak of union labour was precisely in 1940-50 .
- 1944 Breton wood -> US becomes the world reserve currency and being back by more than half the total existence of gold in the world .
- Allies and ennemies almost totally destroy , not much competition on manufacturing . US became the biggest economic force being unscathed by ww2 .
- I suppose Huge advance technology from war to the economy , another factor creating a huge economic boom .
- Huge tax for corporations and much higher distribution of wealth through fiscal policies at that time .
Often High Inflation rates pushing wages higher , peaking in 1951 for that period .

But hey if you think it’s mainly because of huge discrimination it’s fine .
I’m not saying there wasn’t , but people at that times earned their wages and the economic environment coming out of the war favour massively the middle class , regardless of any discrimination .

I think a lot of jobs was still difficult physically too at that time .

This is one of those things where you get a biased perspective. An analogy that comes to mind is election meddling. When the US has an election, you hear complaints about "Russian election meddling" or other such things like oh, how could Russia do such a serious thing to threaten our democracy!

And yet, there's probably not a single election that takes place around the entire globe that the US doesn't **** around with. Every single one. Especially the lesser important states where they casually put in dummy dictators to act as US interest proxies.

The point of the analogy is that from the US' perspective, you hear about people ****ing with the US elections, but not how the US does this to other countries. They complain about something in the media yet do it themselves. From an inflation perspective, the US clearly doesn't care about reporting honest numbers about another country's shitty currency. If anything, being honest about other countries shitty monetary policy can devalue their currency while also boosting the US and legitimacy of any statistics they publish in a broader sense. Meanwhile the inflation narrative they provide domestically can be entirely different.

So yes, I think you are correct in that it is easily caught out for those countries, but it's also easily caught out in this spot too. I don't think your argument makes these things remotely mutually exclusive.

Ultimately... I think my discussion here is done though since it's non-productive at this point. I don't think I'm correct here 100% of the time, but I'd apply an 80-90% confidence interval to my opinion here, which hasn't really changed at all through my discussion with you. What's important is what others and myself have said: Place your financial bets in real life to fit with your world view. If you are in fact correct that the CPI's numbers are accurate, invest accordingly, and profit off of the irrational idiocy of people like myself. I'll be taking the other approach though. And so far, it's working out for me.

Yeah, if you don't read the sources I provided or at least try to find reputable ones on your own their isn't much point continuing. My whole point was the billion prices index caught lies in other countries and failed to do so in the US with the exact same methodology that basically takes any sort of human or political bias out of the equation. Unsurprising that the inflation truthers have the opposite; no calculations a computer can verify just pure political bias. I don't know why you think anybody is going to "make money" off a few random nut jobs with little money being wrong about stuff that has already happened. Trillion dollar markets chug along knowing that inflation was around 3% the last decade. You disagreeing makes no difference to the rest of us.

This is the part where you admit you've been severely owned by 'adulte

Dunno where else to post this but 3 rate hikes are priced for 2022? Considering we haven't had a rate hike in 3 years and the last time we had 7, it had to be immediately reversed, is this really that likely or will the fed hit their head on the ceiling similar to 2021? Albeit earlier than 2.5% this time?

https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/int...n-to-fomc.html

3 rate hikes from 0. At our very high debt levels, hiking to 2% make interest payments on our debt around 1 trillion, this is still manageable. Once we get above that, things start getting iffy. I think we can handle 3 rate hikes next year structurally, whether or not the markets puke once the fed starts is another question.

I'm personally raising cash, selling a fair amount of my gold holdings, selling covered calls on all of my bitcoin and my equity positions are mostly defensive, CVS, fedex, oil/gas and tobacco. I would not want to be far out on the risk curve in 2022, valuations are about to matter again once liquidity is withdrawn.

All you Ivory Tower beard twirling types and your Billion Price Indexes and CPI and Interest Rates need to listen to the late Patrice O Neal breakdown inflation simply for the common man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b-4I2Sh0HM&t=2s

is this permanant and the norm going forward did we rech a new inf peak?

and will raising int rates be enough to stop what is going on?

Why do you think they get iffy above 3 hikes/1T but not higher than that? Why is that the inflection point?

Because our tax receipts in 2021 was $3.86t.

Social security entitlements were 1.1t last year, medicare was 700b and welfare/medicaid cost 1.6t.

Our expenses including the roughly 500b in interest payments are over our tax receipts, which are currently subsidized by the fed/treasury departments monetizing our debt. If we start raising interest rates to double, the math gets extremely iffy on where the money is coming from to subsidize this (without more QE).

In short, the fed cannot raise rates aggressively without QE unless nominal GDP is growing and tax receipts grow with it. We either choose to default on debt obligations at that point or turn the printer back on.

It will ebb and flow. We are going to peak in inflation readings during the next 3 readings because base effects are going to be much harder. Once we start comparing year over year to 5%+ inflation it is hard to be 5% again.

Analysts are projecting Dec 2022 readings to be about 2.9-3.4%, which is still quite elevated.

Inflation doesn't move like a ladder, in the 1940s and 1970s, our last two inflationary decades, it moved like steps. Very elevated inflation, then flat, then elevated again and flat. Once inflation calms down for a bit, I imagine the government will start directly handing out money again to try and force artificial GDP growth.

@SoCalQuest maybe you have an explanation for this, but one thing I don't understand is why do we need quantitative tightening? Just so long-term the fed doesn't buy the entire bond market like it is trending in Japan with BoJ?

The balance sheet is 8.7T right now, I understand why you want to stop QE and stop it from rising, but why does it need to get back down to 5-6-7T? Seems pretty needless.

By reducing treasuries hold by the fed , u increase the amount of treasuries available in the market , which should theoretically bring down the bond prices.

I suppose it’s kind of creating a raising rates without actually doing it .

Part of the reason to reduce the balance sheet is to soak up some of the money in economy.

This is not a good counter argument to a phenomenon that is universal across the western developed world that has massively differing amounts of ethnic diversity.

Where I live is very very low diversity, rural England.

Even as recently as 2002/3 Hairdressers and flower pickers could get on the housing ladder fairly easily, sure as a couple both working, but very doable.

Now they dont have a snowballs chance in hell unless they have good generational wealth transfer.

Now instead of being able to actually generate some degree of actual wealth, they will be living pay check to pay check.

we talking actual inflation or the government presented number based on some altered calculation to make it lower than it actually is?

how is this outlier in inflation not mostly related to supply constraints?

at what point does the fed constantly chase unemployment due to automation?

i think we can all agree a lot of the metrics are outdated, especially considering how fast things are changing in a software based world

Fwiw, I think it just another sign that a real economy is based on people working and not based on profits of corporations gained through automation .
Problems is more they cut jobs (or transfer jobs to another country) to expand profits , less money left in the economy which equal less spending -> that actual create a real job in the economy .
Seem to me it’s spending that creates jobs , not profits ending in assets prices …..

What happens when evrything automatic but no one have cash due to lack of working ?

It seem we kind stuck in place where the snake try to eats his own tail .

This has been asked by man for thousands of years and got super popular 240 years ago. When reminded that this irrational fear has been super popular for thousands of years most men respond, "yeah, but this time it is different."

Automation in 2022 is actually different to automation in 1782.

Just as dumb as its different this time is its completely the same this time.

I think the difference today is the world so connected, automation can destroy jobs per hundreds of thousand in a heartbeat .

Usually crisis are created by the rate of changes and not by the factors themselves.
If u don’t let humans time to adapt , massive problems are ahead imo.

I work in robotics/automation.

This time, it's different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7FscJKTxU

... and its not even the 'robotic' platforms that are going to make the change (although those have gotten ludicrously capable as of late). Its AI. IJ Good speculated about precisely the inflection point we're rapidly approaching in 1965. We're successfully synthesizing human cognition itself, controlled by systems that can "think" (and learn) inconceivably faster than we can. This might/will spiral into things we don't understand.

This will have an existential influence on all economics denominated in human labor and output.
There's a reason insiders (like me, and I'm very low level/otherwise totally unimportant but around the stuff enough to realize what we're in for) have been bawking so loudly about this.

I (personally) watched an intern from an elite engineering school, in one months time, write a program that could recognize two different objects, under basically all environmental conditions, with 99.8 accuracy using a $200 camera. The remaining .2 is being sorted by machine learning and will be there in a year or two. Getting a machine to drive around and select one from the other then go perform some handling/executive function is off the shelf easy

Companies like Telexistance and Phantom, who promote 'remote operations', are (likely) using human inputs to do Bayseian training for those functions to be fully automated.
Give it a couple years, it will be reliable enough to field.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/stores...trolled-robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vngmm5HKMRk

As Cathie Wood/ARK noted, the real miss of Uber and Lyft was not installing sensors on their drivers cars, which would've probably had reliable Level V self driving done and dusted a few years ago.

"This time, it's different" is the saying everyone mocks as always being wrong, save for those times when it's correct.
This is one of those times. The million dollar question is how long it takes before it gets so bad, it cannot be denied any more. Is it 5 years or 25? Or another 50?
Or 3?