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The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries
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Jan 27, 2022, 11:15:57 AM1/27/22
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its fun outing free trade frauds:) The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson.html
The Saker Interviews Michael Hudson
Posted on January 27, 2022 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Michel Hudson, in this short talk with The Saker, debunks many widespread misperceptions about the dollar, the US economy, and the prospects for fundamental change.
I have only a couple of teeny quibbles and a further thought. Hudson discusses private equity buying up single family homes. While that was a very big trend during and after the foreclosure crisis, there’s also been a rise, and not just in big cities, of mom and pop investors buying apartments and homes to rent out on AirBnB. So in recent years, I’m not sure the level of investment buying by private equity is collectively all that much greater than that of well-heeled individuals. We pointed out that private equity had a big problem with single family homes that property management does not scale. In fact, an individual living near their properties (better yet, with a family member in one of the trades or construction) would be able to manage the properties at lower cost than private equity.
The second is I differ a bit on his take that the response of US citizens to falling living standards and rising disfunction will be apathy. That is likely to be the main response, but you will also see more and more incidents of violence. We are already witnessing more shootings of fast food workers and commuters being shoved in front of subway cars. Expect more of that sort of thing…which serves to justify more bunkering of the elites.
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by: mini cboe vix futures
Mini Cboe VIX Futures
Trade your view on equity volatility with Mini VIX futures. Read More
Hudson also describes how indebted many individuals are. The Fed’s consumer debt statistics show that mortgage and credit card debt is not excessive. However, what these analyses miss is what would be called greater operating leverage, by virtue of other fixed costs that may not be in the form of debt but like debt, can’t be defaulted on without serious consequences.
In good old corporate land, to do proper apples to apples analysis of debt levels of companies, you need to capitalize operating leases (like the lease costs on sale-leasebacks of corporate real estate) because those fixed charges are effectively debt.
The analogue for households is medical costs. At a minimum, medical insurance costs have gotten to be so high that they should be capitalized so as to present a more accurate picture of household obligations and their true free cash flow.
Originally published at Vineyard of the Saker. Reproduced with permission of Michael Hudson
ntro: I need to begin with a MAJOR caveat and tell you how/why this “interview” happened. I did not plan to interview Michael Hudson. I was listening to a well known Russian economist, Mikhail Khazin, and I was fascinated by what he was saying. I also understood only some of the points he was making. To put it mildly, I am not an economist, and while listening to Khazin did did not take any notes. What I did do is email Michael and ask him a few question by email, just to clarify my own thoughts and marginally better my (rather dismal) “understanding” of economic and their role in the current standoff. With this typical kindness and generosity, Michael gave me some very interesting answers, and he agreed to allow me to turn this into an interview. So, here are the caveats to keep in mind: I might have misunderstood or forgotten what Khazin actually said. So if the question sounds stupid, please blame me, not Khazin! As they say in the USA, this entire topic is way above my pay grade…
Please think of this as an exchange between a young and ignorant student and a college professor and my apologies to the economists out there :-)
Having said that, here is my exchange with Michael Hudson:
Andrei: Is it true that the USA cannot raise interest rates to lower the inflation rate as this would trigger a cascading series of bankruptcies and cost the Dems the upcoming elections?
Michael Hudson: The Federal Reserve and Treasury painted the U.S. into a corner with its Quantitative Easing to save the banks and brokerage houses after 2008. The policy succeeded in supporting and even raising real estate prices, and providing arbitrage opportunities to borrow at low rates to buy higher-yielding stocks and bonds, vastly increasing the magnitude of financial wealth. This has been especially the case since the pandemic, creating an estimated trillion dollars in “capital gains” (including short term arbitrage) for the wealthiest One Percent.
What seemed to be the financial death trap was the prospect of rising interest rates ending the free lunch of interest-dividend arbitrage, and easy mortgage money. The threat was to reverse the asset-price run-up. We already are seeing that in recent weeks as stocks plunged to reflect the rise in Treasury bond rates.
But by now, 14 years after the Obama bailouts and QE rescue of insolvent banks, a new condition has emerged: a vast sum of private capital seeking to move out of the financial markets. Many of the most astute One Percent is taking their money and running – into private equity and real estate.
The result is that housing prices are soaring as private capital is out-bidding owner-occupant home buyers. While the latter face rising mortgage-interest rates, private capital finds the likelihood for both current rental income and capital gains to be a much better bet than the stock and bond market. The result will not be a decline in real estate prices, but a decline in home-ownership rates as a shift to rental housing occurs. The financial class is becoming the new absentee landlord class.
Lower stock prices will spur a similar private-capital wave o corporate takeovers, posturing as “rescuers” of the economy. The aim will be short-term asset stripping, of course (that is the business plan of private equity), but it will consolidate ownership in the hands of a financial elite. And to the extent that state and local budgets suffer from the downturn, sell-offs of public land and infrastructure also will transfer property and its rent-extracting opportunities into hands – not with borrowed credit but for all-cash, the cash that QE policy and tax favoritism has brought into being in the past 14 years.
So, to the extent that there are bankruptcies, this will have the usual result: consolidation and concentration of wealth ownership. The non-financial economy’s structure is being transformed – under the slogan of individualistic free markets.
Andrei: Is it true that the two digit industrial inflation in the USA cannot be lowered by means or price control, as that would guarantee even more empty shelves and cost the Dems the upcoming elections?
Michael Hudson: The current inflation is not primarily a monetary phenomenon – except for stock, bond and real-estate prices. Raw materials prices, commodity prices and import prices are rising throughout the world. Domestic price controls have no effect on import prices. In theory, they should be able to reduce monopoly prices, but in today’s world the monopolists may simply let shortages develop and wait out the government.
For meat, eggs and other farm produce, the farmers are not receiving higher prices for their crops and produce. The middlemen are gouging out more fees for themselves, thanks to the monopoly position of Cargill et al.
Andrei: Are those who say that the USA cannot export its inflation to other countries by forcing the latter to deflate their currencies and acquire dollars anymore correct?
Michael Hudson: The inflation is global, not stemming from the United States. The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, not only because of port congestion and supply shortages, but because of global energy prices and the fracturing of world trade into dollar-using and dollar-avoiding economies.
The most problematic U.S. economic problem is debt deflation, not price inflation. Payments to the FIRE sector for debt service, health insurance and housing are taking a rising bite out of family budgets for the 99 Percent as the economy polarizes between an alliance of creditors, landlords and monopolists at the top, and debtors, renters and hapless consumers at the bottom.
I don’t know what Mr. Khazin means by his idea that the United States is exporting its inflation. What do other countries buy from the United States, besides arms and agricultural output, patent-protected drugs and information-technology?
Andrei: Khazin also said that the USA needs to crash the EU in order to force Europe to purchase dollars and US goods and services HOWEVER any semi-real war in Europe will crash the international markets and, therefore, also crash the US economy.
Michael Hudson: This argument does not make sense. Europe does not have enough balance-of-payments surplus to buy dollars to support the U.S. exchange rate – and the U.S. economy does not need dollars from Europe, as it can simply print them (as MMT, Dick Cheney and Donald Trump have shown). And “crashing Europe” would not give it more means to buy U.S. exports. “Old Europe” has let U.S. financial diplomacy turn the euro into a satellite currency imposing austerity on the continent – a kind of financial NATO suicide pact.
Andrei: The Fed overprinted dollars and that there is now no way to get these dollars back out of circulation, thus is there is a high chance of stagflation in the USA by this summer?
Michael Hudson: Most Fed “dollars” are not spent on goods and services, but on FIRE-sector assets. There is indeed stagnation in store for the 99 Percent, from a combination of debt deflation (payments to the rentier class) and a price squeeze for basic needs. This is a structural phenomenon (as discussed above), not one of “the money supply.”
Andrei: Between a rabid inflation and the very high insecurity about the future of the economy, will the US industries will have to lower (or even stop) a lot of its current production, resulting in major shortages?
Michael Hudson: There is not that much industry left in the United States beyond the military-industrial complex. I wonder what the author imagines is still around to be cut back. OK, movies and entertainment with Covid-19 closing restaurants, Broadway and movie houses. Consumers will pay for what they need, and the wealthiest will buy luxuries, but the clothing and fashion markets don’t have much exposure in today’s masked-up world.
Andrei: Eventually, government payments and handouts will either lose their value due to inflation or won’t even be paid, right?
Michael Hudson: There is no problem of the U.S. government not having the money to pay. Inasmuch as most payments are to the wealthiest FIRE sector classes that have become the political Donor Class, there’s no need to worry. The recent wave of savings INTO Treasury bonds show that it is still the safest haven.
Andrei: Since there is nothing the White House or the Fed can do about any of that, do you think that there will be a lot of violence and state repression?
Michael Hudson: Well, there may be violence from the homelessness that looks imminent from the evictions, now that the Covid rent and mortgage moratorium is expiring. This may indeed take the form of racial tensions. But this is nothing like a revolutionary situation. It is highly localized and “free-market.” No political alternative appears on the horizon, as the U.S. is becoming even more of a one-party state (with the role of the Democrats being to block any challenge from “the left” to pro-Wall Street and pro-corporate Republicans. There really is no left-wing party with an independent program. The Democratic Party has co-opted them and buried them in a minority. So instead of violence, we are likely to see apathy – lower voter turnouts, a rising Republican majority in Congress, and enough Democrats to be Republicans pretending to be Democrats (not only Manchin and Sinema but Pelosi, Schumer, etc.) that psychology and anger will simply turn within. Suicide rates will rise.
In short, it looks like what a schlock 1950s science fiction movie would have described as the End Time of Revelation, rent by earth, air, fire and water. The earth is warming, pollution is continuing to cause extreme weather, forest fires are spreading, water levels are going to rise (and subsoil water is polluted by fracking, while the melting of glaciers create drought, ending electric power from dams). Heavier water is leading to earthquakes. We’re all just waiting for San Andreas and its relatives to blow the Seven Trumpets.
Andrei:So where does this leave Congress and the Democrat/Republican standoff?
Michael Hudson: As long as the filibuster is retained, Congress is paralyzed, as each party has the ability to block the other, and voters are almost equally divided as to whether real estate and financial wealth is to be concentrated in the hands of the One Percent by the Republicans (representing corporate America) or the Democrats (representing Wall Street). With so little difference between them in practice, this leaves law-making to the Supreme Court. And it has been put in place by right-wing Republicans, with full acquiescence from the Democrats (Senator Biden led the party’s notorious support for Justice Thomas.)
That’s why Justice Breyer just announced his retirement from the court today, to give President Biden an opportunity to name the next justice. His problem is to find a black women sufficiently right-wing not to threaten his party’s own Donor Class – knowing that in any case, the court is already set on a Republican cultural-political track for the next decade.
Breyer’s hurry reflected his recognition that the Democrats are about to lose heavily in November’s election, so there are only nine months to install a new member of the Court. The Democratic Leadership insists that the party has already moved too far to the left, despite breaking Biden’s promise to raise the minimum wage, cutting back CARES disbursements from Trump’s $2000 to just $1400, dropping the “social infrastructure” elements of his Build Back Better by being saved by Sens. Manchin and Sinema getting him off the hook so as to back his basic campaign promise that “Nothing will change very much.”
With a policy like that, why should Democrats turn out? What’s he done for them lately? Are they going to believe his rhetoric, or what’s actually happening to the economy and to them?
Andrei: thank you so much, dear Michael, for your time and much needed insights!!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson.html
The Saker Interviews Michael Hudson
Posted on January 27, 2022 by Yves Smith
Yves here. Michel Hudson, in this short talk with The Saker, debunks many widespread misperceptions about the dollar, the US economy, and the prospects for fundamental change.
I have only a couple of teeny quibbles and a further thought. Hudson discusses private equity buying up single family homes. While that was a very big trend during and after the foreclosure crisis, there’s also been a rise, and not just in big cities, of mom and pop investors buying apartments and homes to rent out on AirBnB. So in recent years, I’m not sure the level of investment buying by private equity is collectively all that much greater than that of well-heeled individuals. We pointed out that private equity had a big problem with single family homes that property management does not scale. In fact, an individual living near their properties (better yet, with a family member in one of the trades or construction) would be able to manage the properties at lower cost than private equity.
The second is I differ a bit on his take that the response of US citizens to falling living standards and rising disfunction will be apathy. That is likely to be the main response, but you will also see more and more incidents of violence. We are already witnessing more shootings of fast food workers and commuters being shoved in front of subway cars. Expect more of that sort of thing…which serves to justify more bunkering of the elites.
Sponsored Content
by: mini cboe vix futures
Mini Cboe VIX Futures
Trade your view on equity volatility with Mini VIX futures. Read More
Hudson also describes how indebted many individuals are. The Fed’s consumer debt statistics show that mortgage and credit card debt is not excessive. However, what these analyses miss is what would be called greater operating leverage, by virtue of other fixed costs that may not be in the form of debt but like debt, can’t be defaulted on without serious consequences.
In good old corporate land, to do proper apples to apples analysis of debt levels of companies, you need to capitalize operating leases (like the lease costs on sale-leasebacks of corporate real estate) because those fixed charges are effectively debt.
The analogue for households is medical costs. At a minimum, medical insurance costs have gotten to be so high that they should be capitalized so as to present a more accurate picture of household obligations and their true free cash flow.
Originally published at Vineyard of the Saker. Reproduced with permission of Michael Hudson
ntro: I need to begin with a MAJOR caveat and tell you how/why this “interview” happened. I did not plan to interview Michael Hudson. I was listening to a well known Russian economist, Mikhail Khazin, and I was fascinated by what he was saying. I also understood only some of the points he was making. To put it mildly, I am not an economist, and while listening to Khazin did did not take any notes. What I did do is email Michael and ask him a few question by email, just to clarify my own thoughts and marginally better my (rather dismal) “understanding” of economic and their role in the current standoff. With this typical kindness and generosity, Michael gave me some very interesting answers, and he agreed to allow me to turn this into an interview. So, here are the caveats to keep in mind: I might have misunderstood or forgotten what Khazin actually said. So if the question sounds stupid, please blame me, not Khazin! As they say in the USA, this entire topic is way above my pay grade…
Please think of this as an exchange between a young and ignorant student and a college professor and my apologies to the economists out there :-)
Having said that, here is my exchange with Michael Hudson:
Andrei: Is it true that the USA cannot raise interest rates to lower the inflation rate as this would trigger a cascading series of bankruptcies and cost the Dems the upcoming elections?
Michael Hudson: The Federal Reserve and Treasury painted the U.S. into a corner with its Quantitative Easing to save the banks and brokerage houses after 2008. The policy succeeded in supporting and even raising real estate prices, and providing arbitrage opportunities to borrow at low rates to buy higher-yielding stocks and bonds, vastly increasing the magnitude of financial wealth. This has been especially the case since the pandemic, creating an estimated trillion dollars in “capital gains” (including short term arbitrage) for the wealthiest One Percent.
What seemed to be the financial death trap was the prospect of rising interest rates ending the free lunch of interest-dividend arbitrage, and easy mortgage money. The threat was to reverse the asset-price run-up. We already are seeing that in recent weeks as stocks plunged to reflect the rise in Treasury bond rates.
But by now, 14 years after the Obama bailouts and QE rescue of insolvent banks, a new condition has emerged: a vast sum of private capital seeking to move out of the financial markets. Many of the most astute One Percent is taking their money and running – into private equity and real estate.
The result is that housing prices are soaring as private capital is out-bidding owner-occupant home buyers. While the latter face rising mortgage-interest rates, private capital finds the likelihood for both current rental income and capital gains to be a much better bet than the stock and bond market. The result will not be a decline in real estate prices, but a decline in home-ownership rates as a shift to rental housing occurs. The financial class is becoming the new absentee landlord class.
Lower stock prices will spur a similar private-capital wave o corporate takeovers, posturing as “rescuers” of the economy. The aim will be short-term asset stripping, of course (that is the business plan of private equity), but it will consolidate ownership in the hands of a financial elite. And to the extent that state and local budgets suffer from the downturn, sell-offs of public land and infrastructure also will transfer property and its rent-extracting opportunities into hands – not with borrowed credit but for all-cash, the cash that QE policy and tax favoritism has brought into being in the past 14 years.
So, to the extent that there are bankruptcies, this will have the usual result: consolidation and concentration of wealth ownership. The non-financial economy’s structure is being transformed – under the slogan of individualistic free markets.
Andrei: Is it true that the two digit industrial inflation in the USA cannot be lowered by means or price control, as that would guarantee even more empty shelves and cost the Dems the upcoming elections?
Michael Hudson: The current inflation is not primarily a monetary phenomenon – except for stock, bond and real-estate prices. Raw materials prices, commodity prices and import prices are rising throughout the world. Domestic price controls have no effect on import prices. In theory, they should be able to reduce monopoly prices, but in today’s world the monopolists may simply let shortages develop and wait out the government.
For meat, eggs and other farm produce, the farmers are not receiving higher prices for their crops and produce. The middlemen are gouging out more fees for themselves, thanks to the monopoly position of Cargill et al.
Andrei: Are those who say that the USA cannot export its inflation to other countries by forcing the latter to deflate their currencies and acquire dollars anymore correct?
Michael Hudson: The inflation is global, not stemming from the United States. The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, not only because of port congestion and supply shortages, but because of global energy prices and the fracturing of world trade into dollar-using and dollar-avoiding economies.
The most problematic U.S. economic problem is debt deflation, not price inflation. Payments to the FIRE sector for debt service, health insurance and housing are taking a rising bite out of family budgets for the 99 Percent as the economy polarizes between an alliance of creditors, landlords and monopolists at the top, and debtors, renters and hapless consumers at the bottom.
I don’t know what Mr. Khazin means by his idea that the United States is exporting its inflation. What do other countries buy from the United States, besides arms and agricultural output, patent-protected drugs and information-technology?
Andrei: Khazin also said that the USA needs to crash the EU in order to force Europe to purchase dollars and US goods and services HOWEVER any semi-real war in Europe will crash the international markets and, therefore, also crash the US economy.
Michael Hudson: This argument does not make sense. Europe does not have enough balance-of-payments surplus to buy dollars to support the U.S. exchange rate – and the U.S. economy does not need dollars from Europe, as it can simply print them (as MMT, Dick Cheney and Donald Trump have shown). And “crashing Europe” would not give it more means to buy U.S. exports. “Old Europe” has let U.S. financial diplomacy turn the euro into a satellite currency imposing austerity on the continent – a kind of financial NATO suicide pact.
Andrei: The Fed overprinted dollars and that there is now no way to get these dollars back out of circulation, thus is there is a high chance of stagflation in the USA by this summer?
Michael Hudson: Most Fed “dollars” are not spent on goods and services, but on FIRE-sector assets. There is indeed stagnation in store for the 99 Percent, from a combination of debt deflation (payments to the rentier class) and a price squeeze for basic needs. This is a structural phenomenon (as discussed above), not one of “the money supply.”
Andrei: Between a rabid inflation and the very high insecurity about the future of the economy, will the US industries will have to lower (or even stop) a lot of its current production, resulting in major shortages?
Michael Hudson: There is not that much industry left in the United States beyond the military-industrial complex. I wonder what the author imagines is still around to be cut back. OK, movies and entertainment with Covid-19 closing restaurants, Broadway and movie houses. Consumers will pay for what they need, and the wealthiest will buy luxuries, but the clothing and fashion markets don’t have much exposure in today’s masked-up world.
Andrei: Eventually, government payments and handouts will either lose their value due to inflation or won’t even be paid, right?
Michael Hudson: There is no problem of the U.S. government not having the money to pay. Inasmuch as most payments are to the wealthiest FIRE sector classes that have become the political Donor Class, there’s no need to worry. The recent wave of savings INTO Treasury bonds show that it is still the safest haven.
Andrei: Since there is nothing the White House or the Fed can do about any of that, do you think that there will be a lot of violence and state repression?
Michael Hudson: Well, there may be violence from the homelessness that looks imminent from the evictions, now that the Covid rent and mortgage moratorium is expiring. This may indeed take the form of racial tensions. But this is nothing like a revolutionary situation. It is highly localized and “free-market.” No political alternative appears on the horizon, as the U.S. is becoming even more of a one-party state (with the role of the Democrats being to block any challenge from “the left” to pro-Wall Street and pro-corporate Republicans. There really is no left-wing party with an independent program. The Democratic Party has co-opted them and buried them in a minority. So instead of violence, we are likely to see apathy – lower voter turnouts, a rising Republican majority in Congress, and enough Democrats to be Republicans pretending to be Democrats (not only Manchin and Sinema but Pelosi, Schumer, etc.) that psychology and anger will simply turn within. Suicide rates will rise.
In short, it looks like what a schlock 1950s science fiction movie would have described as the End Time of Revelation, rent by earth, air, fire and water. The earth is warming, pollution is continuing to cause extreme weather, forest fires are spreading, water levels are going to rise (and subsoil water is polluted by fracking, while the melting of glaciers create drought, ending electric power from dams). Heavier water is leading to earthquakes. We’re all just waiting for San Andreas and its relatives to blow the Seven Trumpets.
Andrei:So where does this leave Congress and the Democrat/Republican standoff?
Michael Hudson: As long as the filibuster is retained, Congress is paralyzed, as each party has the ability to block the other, and voters are almost equally divided as to whether real estate and financial wealth is to be concentrated in the hands of the One Percent by the Republicans (representing corporate America) or the Democrats (representing Wall Street). With so little difference between them in practice, this leaves law-making to the Supreme Court. And it has been put in place by right-wing Republicans, with full acquiescence from the Democrats (Senator Biden led the party’s notorious support for Justice Thomas.)
That’s why Justice Breyer just announced his retirement from the court today, to give President Biden an opportunity to name the next justice. His problem is to find a black women sufficiently right-wing not to threaten his party’s own Donor Class – knowing that in any case, the court is already set on a Republican cultural-political track for the next decade.
Breyer’s hurry reflected his recognition that the Democrats are about to lose heavily in November’s election, so there are only nine months to install a new member of the Court. The Democratic Leadership insists that the party has already moved too far to the left, despite breaking Biden’s promise to raise the minimum wage, cutting back CARES disbursements from Trump’s $2000 to just $1400, dropping the “social infrastructure” elements of his Build Back Better by being saved by Sens. Manchin and Sinema getting him off the hook so as to back his basic campaign promise that “Nothing will change very much.”
With a policy like that, why should Democrats turn out? What’s he done for them lately? Are they going to believe his rhetoric, or what’s actually happening to the economy and to them?
Andrei: thank you so much, dear Michael, for your time and much needed insights!!
nickname unavailable
Jan 28, 2022, 7:19:28 PM1/28/22
to
the inevitable results of nafta billy clintons free trade: Inflation gave U.S. workers a pay cut last year, and it could get even worse
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/inflation-gave-u-workers-pay-153926026.html
Fortune
Inflation gave U.S. workers a pay cut last year, and it could get even worse
Brendan Smialowski—Getty Images
Megan Leonhardt
Fri, January 28, 2022, 9:39 AM
Americans finally saw their pay go up in a big way last year, but sky-high inflation is eating into that new purchasing power in a big way.
Workers’ wages rose 3.3% at the end of last year, the biggest annual jump in pay since Payscale, a compensation software and data company, started tracking the data in 2007. But once the effect of inflation is factored in, workers actually took a 1.3% year-over-year pay cut.
It's not just PayScale's research showing that inflation is blunting the effects of higher wages. After adjusting for inflation, after-tax personal income nationwide was down 0.2% in December from November, according to estimates released Friday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Companies are expected to continue to boost wages again this year, with workers expected to get an average pay raise of 3.9% in 2022, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit business and research organization that distributes economic information to members. That would be the highest wage hike since 2008, but if inflation continues to run hot, it may not be enough.
The Biden administration has been struggling with media headlines highlighting the highest rate of inflation in 40 years, with notable critics such as Larry Summers likening his economic policies to those seen during the “Great Inflation” of the 1970s, when the economy struggled with “stagflation.” But as current wage growth and employment data shows, the economy is far from stagnant, though inflation is running very hot. It's akin to a combination of Jimmy Carter–era inflation with Ronald Reagan–era growth.
"Personal income is rising solidly thanks to continued improvement in the labor market, especially strong wage growth as businesses raise pay to compete for workers," Gus Faucher, PNC's chief economist, said Friday. But he warned that the "biggest drags" in 2022 will be the ongoing pandemic and high inflation.
In December, the prices of consumer goods and services were up 7% year over year, according to the latest consumer price index (CPI) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That was the second month in a row where the annual increase was the largest rise in the inflation rate in 40 years.
And experts don’t expect inflation to drop off dramatically this year. “[Inflation] hasn’t gotten better, it’s probably gotten just a bit worse [since December],” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday. Experts are predicting that inflation will slow down this year but will likely run higher than the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate.
“I would imagine it would come down a little bit, but probably not getting back to 2% right away,” Dana Peterson, Conference Board’s chief economist, said Thursday during a press briefing. Even if the U.S. peaks at the 7% year-over-year inflation growth in December, Peterson says, “we're still looking at, you know, 4% and 5% inflation for many months.” And that could continue to hit workers' paychecks.
In fact, inflation has run higher than 2% throughout much of the COVID-19 pandemic because there’s been a strong demand for goods as Americans have been unable to engage in their normal routines. Supply has lagged as companies had to deal with facility closures and COVID cases affecting the workforce. Not to mention the supply-chain bottlenecks and higher transportation costs. “All these things are feeding into inflation,” Peterson said.
It’s a trend that has the Fed concerned. “High inflation is taking away the benefits of some of these large wage increases that we're seeing now,” Powell said Wednesday. “We understand that high inflation imposes significant hardship, especially on those least able to meet the higher costs of essentials like food, housing, and transportation.”
In an effort to bring down inflation, the Fed is expected to start increasing interest rates in March, a move that aims to cool down consumer demand.
The Fed, however, is walking a bit of a tightrope between getting inflation back down to 2% and providing enough support to keep the labor market healthy. Generally speaking, low interest rates encourage more spending and that demand spurs more jobs.
“We're prepared to use our tools to assure that higher inflation does not become entrenched,” Powell said Wednesday.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Fortune
Inflation gave U.S. workers a pay cut last year, and it could get even worse
Brendan Smialowski—Getty Images
Megan Leonhardt
Fri, January 28, 2022, 9:39 AM
Americans finally saw their pay go up in a big way last year, but sky-high inflation is eating into that new purchasing power in a big way.
Workers’ wages rose 3.3% at the end of last year, the biggest annual jump in pay since Payscale, a compensation software and data company, started tracking the data in 2007. But once the effect of inflation is factored in, workers actually took a 1.3% year-over-year pay cut.
It's not just PayScale's research showing that inflation is blunting the effects of higher wages. After adjusting for inflation, after-tax personal income nationwide was down 0.2% in December from November, according to estimates released Friday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Companies are expected to continue to boost wages again this year, with workers expected to get an average pay raise of 3.9% in 2022, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit business and research organization that distributes economic information to members. That would be the highest wage hike since 2008, but if inflation continues to run hot, it may not be enough.
The Biden administration has been struggling with media headlines highlighting the highest rate of inflation in 40 years, with notable critics such as Larry Summers likening his economic policies to those seen during the “Great Inflation” of the 1970s, when the economy struggled with “stagflation.” But as current wage growth and employment data shows, the economy is far from stagnant, though inflation is running very hot. It's akin to a combination of Jimmy Carter–era inflation with Ronald Reagan–era growth.
"Personal income is rising solidly thanks to continued improvement in the labor market, especially strong wage growth as businesses raise pay to compete for workers," Gus Faucher, PNC's chief economist, said Friday. But he warned that the "biggest drags" in 2022 will be the ongoing pandemic and high inflation.
In December, the prices of consumer goods and services were up 7% year over year, according to the latest consumer price index (CPI) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That was the second month in a row where the annual increase was the largest rise in the inflation rate in 40 years.
And experts don’t expect inflation to drop off dramatically this year. “[Inflation] hasn’t gotten better, it’s probably gotten just a bit worse [since December],” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday. Experts are predicting that inflation will slow down this year but will likely run higher than the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate.
“I would imagine it would come down a little bit, but probably not getting back to 2% right away,” Dana Peterson, Conference Board’s chief economist, said Thursday during a press briefing. Even if the U.S. peaks at the 7% year-over-year inflation growth in December, Peterson says, “we're still looking at, you know, 4% and 5% inflation for many months.” And that could continue to hit workers' paychecks.
In fact, inflation has run higher than 2% throughout much of the COVID-19 pandemic because there’s been a strong demand for goods as Americans have been unable to engage in their normal routines. Supply has lagged as companies had to deal with facility closures and COVID cases affecting the workforce. Not to mention the supply-chain bottlenecks and higher transportation costs. “All these things are feeding into inflation,” Peterson said.
It’s a trend that has the Fed concerned. “High inflation is taking away the benefits of some of these large wage increases that we're seeing now,” Powell said Wednesday. “We understand that high inflation imposes significant hardship, especially on those least able to meet the higher costs of essentials like food, housing, and transportation.”
In an effort to bring down inflation, the Fed is expected to start increasing interest rates in March, a move that aims to cool down consumer demand.
The Fed, however, is walking a bit of a tightrope between getting inflation back down to 2% and providing enough support to keep the labor market healthy. Generally speaking, low interest rates encourage more spending and that demand spurs more jobs.
“We're prepared to use our tools to assure that higher inflation does not become entrenched,” Powell said Wednesday.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
nickname unavailable
Jan 29, 2022, 12:34:27 PM1/29/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade U.S. Natural Gas Prices Climb Most Ever In Single Day
U.S. natural gas futures surged 72% just ahead of expiration of the February contract
dead silence out of the free trader who was so worried about the poor and farmers under trumpS "TARIFFS"
wages exceeded inflation for 3 tears under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/US-Natural-Gas-Prices-Climb-Most-Ever-In-A-Single-Day.html
Julianne Geiger
Julianne Geiger
Julianne Geiger is a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group.
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U.S. Natural Gas Prices Climb Most Ever In Single Day
By Julianne Geiger - Jan 27, 2022, 3:57 PM CST
U.S. natural gas futures surged 72% just ahead of expiration of the February contract
The huge spike in the February contract is a clear sign that bearish bets were being squeezed out of the market
Cold weather in many parts of the United States have boosted demand for the energy commodity
Join Our Community
U.S. natural gas future prices skyrocketed 72% on Thursday on forecasts of colder weather. It was the sharpest one-day climb for the commodity since the contract launched in 1990, CME Group data confirmed.
The 72% surge in prices came before the expiry of the February contract for nat gas as weather forecasts now look colder. The March contract’s price rise paled compared to the February contract rise. But the 10% rise for the March contract—on any other day—would have been more noticeable.
Natural gas futures were trading below $4.50 per million British thermal units for most of the trading day, but some time after 12:45 p.m. EST, prices scrambled for the $7 mark, with the contract eventually settling at $6.265.
The huge spike in the February contract is a clear sign that bearish bets were being squeezed out of the market.
Natural gas prices have been particularly volatile as of late, with nat gas prices surging 6% just a day earlier as cold weather in many parts of the United States boosted demand and the Russia-Ukraine conflict spooked the market into fearing disruptions to the flow of natural gas from Russia to Europe.
The cold weather is expected to boost demand for natural gas through space heating and electricity in the coming days, with estimates from NatGasWeather.com estimating that natural gas demand will be strong through the weekend as a cold snap is expected to hit many parts of the country.
But today’s price movement is certainly more about a short squeeze than about demand forecasts. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, hedge funds have been net-long on nat gas contracts, expecting prices to rise. But money managers have still held onto a fair share of short positions.
Given the price spike, it is clear that some of those money managers waited until the eleventh hour to cover their short bets.
U.S. natural gas futures surged 72% just ahead of expiration of the February contract
dead silence out of the free trader who was so worried about the poor and farmers under trumpS "TARIFFS"
wages exceeded inflation for 3 tears under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Julianne Geiger
Julianne Geiger
Julianne Geiger is a veteran editor, writer and researcher for Oilprice.com, and a member of the Creative Professionals Networking Group.
More Info
Share
Premium Content
A Nightmare Start To The Year For Clean Energy Stocks
Why Are Oil Prices And Stock Markets Diverging?
Oil Prices Under Pressure As Crude Inventories Rise
Russia's Increasingly Aggressive Geopolitical Maneuvering
U.S. Natural Gas Prices Climb Most Ever In Single Day
By Julianne Geiger - Jan 27, 2022, 3:57 PM CST
U.S. natural gas futures surged 72% just ahead of expiration of the February contract
The huge spike in the February contract is a clear sign that bearish bets were being squeezed out of the market
Cold weather in many parts of the United States have boosted demand for the energy commodity
Join Our Community
U.S. natural gas future prices skyrocketed 72% on Thursday on forecasts of colder weather. It was the sharpest one-day climb for the commodity since the contract launched in 1990, CME Group data confirmed.
The 72% surge in prices came before the expiry of the February contract for nat gas as weather forecasts now look colder. The March contract’s price rise paled compared to the February contract rise. But the 10% rise for the March contract—on any other day—would have been more noticeable.
Natural gas futures were trading below $4.50 per million British thermal units for most of the trading day, but some time after 12:45 p.m. EST, prices scrambled for the $7 mark, with the contract eventually settling at $6.265.
The huge spike in the February contract is a clear sign that bearish bets were being squeezed out of the market.
Natural gas prices have been particularly volatile as of late, with nat gas prices surging 6% just a day earlier as cold weather in many parts of the United States boosted demand and the Russia-Ukraine conflict spooked the market into fearing disruptions to the flow of natural gas from Russia to Europe.
The cold weather is expected to boost demand for natural gas through space heating and electricity in the coming days, with estimates from NatGasWeather.com estimating that natural gas demand will be strong through the weekend as a cold snap is expected to hit many parts of the country.
But today’s price movement is certainly more about a short squeeze than about demand forecasts. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, hedge funds have been net-long on nat gas contracts, expecting prices to rise. But money managers have still held onto a fair share of short positions.
Given the price spike, it is clear that some of those money managers waited until the eleventh hour to cover their short bets.
nickname unavailable
Jan 29, 2022, 11:10:09 PM1/29/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade. prices are rising on the poor so fast, retailers cannot keep up with the price hikes
dead silence out of the free trader who was so worried about the poor and farmers under trumps "TARIFFS"
wages exceeded inflation for 3 tears under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/inflation-hits-minnesota-smaller-cities-010000928.html
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Inflation hits Minnesota’s smaller cities, rural areas harder than Twin Cities
1 / 3
Inflation hits Minnesota’s smaller cities, rural areas harder than Twin Cities
Star Tribune/TNS
Kavita Kumar, Gita Sitaramiah, Star Tribune
Sat, January 29, 2022, 7:00 PM
With food costs rising faster than he's ever seen, Brett Almich, a third-generation grocery store owner in southwestern Minnesota, spends more time running numbers and deciding how much to raise prices.
"I used to worry about being competitive and not overpriced," he said last week. "Now I need to make sure my prices are where I need to make the margin to pay the bills."
The changes are happening fastest on meat and soda, said Almich, whose stores are in Clara City, Slayton and Granite Falls. Suppliers used to give him a few months' notice on a price change, but these days the warnings come with just a week for him to adjust.
Since the U.S. economy last spring took its first big steps out of the pandemic downturn, prices have raced upward at the fastest pace in decades. Smaller towns in the Midwest are among the hardest hit.
Rochester; St. Cloud; Mankato; Fargo, N.D.; and La Crosse, Wis., reached an inflation rate above 8% through the last months of 2021, Moody's Analytics found in an analysis of smaller markets. Duluth was just below that level.
The U.S. as a whole reached 7% — the highest level since 1982 — in December's consumer price index. Urban market data, which comes out every other month, showed the Twin Cities with an inflation rate of 6.9% in November, the latest month available.
For the broader Midwest, inflation was 7.5% in December, far above the 5.9% rate in the more heavily populated northeastern states.
People in the Midwest and in less populated areas tend to spend a bigger portion of their budgets on the very items undergoing the biggest price increases. Gas is a big one, the price of which has risen nearly 50% in the last year.
"Fuel costs are going to hit people harder in the Midwest because they tend to have longer commutes and to travel more," said Louis Johnston, an economics professor at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in St. Joseph, Minn.
Things are more spread out, and there's less public transportation. People are more likely to own cars, the prices of which have also greatly increased in the last year. And they're likely to have bigger vehicles that use more gas, Johnston added.
The leap in gas prices also shows up indirectly in goods that have higher shipping costs priced in.
"You have to ship a lot of goods here. We're not on the coasts," said Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Rates for long-haul trucking have gone up quite a bit because it's hard to find drivers. Could that be contributing to why this region is seeing more inflation than some other parts of the country? It wouldn't surprise me."
On top of that, living in a colder place than most Americans, Minnesotans also spend more on needs such as heating. The price of natural gas has risen 24% over the last 12 months.
In smaller towns of the Midwest, people also spend a greater portion of their budgets on physical goods, said Adam Kamins, senior director of U.S. regional economics for Moody's Analytics. "Minneapolis is a much more service-oriented economy — and services are not experiencing the same kind of inflation as goods," he said. "So, you're not seeing price pressures quite as pronounced there."
Beyond the reasons for the pricing difference, the effects tend to be more painful in smaller communities, too.
Mark Bergen, an expert on pricing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, noted that smaller towns and rural areas have a higher proportion of people on fixed incomes and low incomes, making it more difficult for them to adjust to fast price increases.
"They are likely to have more difficult budget constraints and more difficult trade-offs," he said.
Terri Bunnell knows all about those trade-offs. The higher prices she's been encountering at the grocery store and at the gas pump have led her to stop going out with friends.
"It's not just because of COVID; it's because I can't really afford to," she said.
Bunnell, who lives right outside of Duluth, has a daughter and two grandchildren who live in Iowa. But because of the higher gas and food prices, she hasn't driven down to see them since last May.
When she does buy groceries, she see that the containers they come in are often smaller but the prices are also higher.
The food shelf in Rochester run by Channel One Regional Food Bank has seen a lot more first-time visitors lately, from about 400 a month over the summer to about 650 in November. Virginia Merritt, the food bank's executive director, suspects it's because residents are struggling to keep up with inflation.
"Unemployment is low, and if you look at what is the big thing that has changed in that time frame, it's the increase in prices," she said.
Meanwhile, the food bank, which assists people in 14 counties in southeastern Minnesota, is getting fewer government commodities and less donated food. Grocery stores have more empty shelves because of supply chain issues, which means less leftover food to give to food banks.
"We're buying a lot more food than we typically would," Merritt said.
Coborn's, the St. Cloud-based grocery chain, is seeing inflationary increases in everything from meat to produce to kitchen supplies and paper goods at its 66 stores, most in smaller towns. It partnered with Kansas City, Kan.-based Associated Wholesale Grocers Inc., which just opened a new warehouse in St. Cloud, in an effort to cope with the product availability issues that the grocer also faces.
"We've just adapted new policies and new ways to procure goods as the times rapidly change," said Dennis Host, Coborn's vice president of marketing.
The Federal Reserve signaled last week it will start to raise interest rates, likely in March, to help slow inflation. Many economists expect these high inflation readings to begin to ease in the coming months, though it's unclear how fast they will come down.
But some of the key factors driving up inflation, such as start-and-stop work at factories in countries still contending with high rates of COVID-19, could take much of the year to normalize. The ongoing pressure of inflation may also slow the broader recovery that's been visible in declining unemployment and rising economic output rates.
Phil Lempert, editor of Supermarketguru.com, expects food prices to continue rising for another 12 to 18 months.
"They're not going to go down after that. We have the cheapest food supply in the world, which is great. It's spoiled us," he said. "The days of these really cheap foods is over, in my opinion."
He pointed to climate change as a future threat, noting global potato shortages and floods in Brazil impacting coffee production.
At Almich's Markets, a pound of ground beef runs $4.69 versus $3.99 a year earlier. A 12-pack of Coke now goes for $7.29 versus $6.49 a year ago. Unlike larger corporate grocery stores in the Twin Cities, Almich said stores like his always face higher costs on average than large retailers that buy bigger volumes.
"Being the only grocery store in these small towns means being able to survive is essential," he said.
dead silence out of the free trader who was so worried about the poor and farmers under trumps "TARIFFS"
wages exceeded inflation for 3 tears under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
Inflation hits Minnesota’s smaller cities, rural areas harder than Twin Cities
1 / 3
Inflation hits Minnesota’s smaller cities, rural areas harder than Twin Cities
Star Tribune/TNS
Kavita Kumar, Gita Sitaramiah, Star Tribune
Sat, January 29, 2022, 7:00 PM
With food costs rising faster than he's ever seen, Brett Almich, a third-generation grocery store owner in southwestern Minnesota, spends more time running numbers and deciding how much to raise prices.
"I used to worry about being competitive and not overpriced," he said last week. "Now I need to make sure my prices are where I need to make the margin to pay the bills."
The changes are happening fastest on meat and soda, said Almich, whose stores are in Clara City, Slayton and Granite Falls. Suppliers used to give him a few months' notice on a price change, but these days the warnings come with just a week for him to adjust.
Since the U.S. economy last spring took its first big steps out of the pandemic downturn, prices have raced upward at the fastest pace in decades. Smaller towns in the Midwest are among the hardest hit.
Rochester; St. Cloud; Mankato; Fargo, N.D.; and La Crosse, Wis., reached an inflation rate above 8% through the last months of 2021, Moody's Analytics found in an analysis of smaller markets. Duluth was just below that level.
The U.S. as a whole reached 7% — the highest level since 1982 — in December's consumer price index. Urban market data, which comes out every other month, showed the Twin Cities with an inflation rate of 6.9% in November, the latest month available.
For the broader Midwest, inflation was 7.5% in December, far above the 5.9% rate in the more heavily populated northeastern states.
People in the Midwest and in less populated areas tend to spend a bigger portion of their budgets on the very items undergoing the biggest price increases. Gas is a big one, the price of which has risen nearly 50% in the last year.
"Fuel costs are going to hit people harder in the Midwest because they tend to have longer commutes and to travel more," said Louis Johnston, an economics professor at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in St. Joseph, Minn.
Things are more spread out, and there's less public transportation. People are more likely to own cars, the prices of which have also greatly increased in the last year. And they're likely to have bigger vehicles that use more gas, Johnston added.
The leap in gas prices also shows up indirectly in goods that have higher shipping costs priced in.
"You have to ship a lot of goods here. We're not on the coasts," said Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Rates for long-haul trucking have gone up quite a bit because it's hard to find drivers. Could that be contributing to why this region is seeing more inflation than some other parts of the country? It wouldn't surprise me."
On top of that, living in a colder place than most Americans, Minnesotans also spend more on needs such as heating. The price of natural gas has risen 24% over the last 12 months.
In smaller towns of the Midwest, people also spend a greater portion of their budgets on physical goods, said Adam Kamins, senior director of U.S. regional economics for Moody's Analytics. "Minneapolis is a much more service-oriented economy — and services are not experiencing the same kind of inflation as goods," he said. "So, you're not seeing price pressures quite as pronounced there."
Beyond the reasons for the pricing difference, the effects tend to be more painful in smaller communities, too.
Mark Bergen, an expert on pricing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, noted that smaller towns and rural areas have a higher proportion of people on fixed incomes and low incomes, making it more difficult for them to adjust to fast price increases.
"They are likely to have more difficult budget constraints and more difficult trade-offs," he said.
Terri Bunnell knows all about those trade-offs. The higher prices she's been encountering at the grocery store and at the gas pump have led her to stop going out with friends.
"It's not just because of COVID; it's because I can't really afford to," she said.
Bunnell, who lives right outside of Duluth, has a daughter and two grandchildren who live in Iowa. But because of the higher gas and food prices, she hasn't driven down to see them since last May.
When she does buy groceries, she see that the containers they come in are often smaller but the prices are also higher.
The food shelf in Rochester run by Channel One Regional Food Bank has seen a lot more first-time visitors lately, from about 400 a month over the summer to about 650 in November. Virginia Merritt, the food bank's executive director, suspects it's because residents are struggling to keep up with inflation.
"Unemployment is low, and if you look at what is the big thing that has changed in that time frame, it's the increase in prices," she said.
Meanwhile, the food bank, which assists people in 14 counties in southeastern Minnesota, is getting fewer government commodities and less donated food. Grocery stores have more empty shelves because of supply chain issues, which means less leftover food to give to food banks.
"We're buying a lot more food than we typically would," Merritt said.
Coborn's, the St. Cloud-based grocery chain, is seeing inflationary increases in everything from meat to produce to kitchen supplies and paper goods at its 66 stores, most in smaller towns. It partnered with Kansas City, Kan.-based Associated Wholesale Grocers Inc., which just opened a new warehouse in St. Cloud, in an effort to cope with the product availability issues that the grocer also faces.
"We've just adapted new policies and new ways to procure goods as the times rapidly change," said Dennis Host, Coborn's vice president of marketing.
The Federal Reserve signaled last week it will start to raise interest rates, likely in March, to help slow inflation. Many economists expect these high inflation readings to begin to ease in the coming months, though it's unclear how fast they will come down.
But some of the key factors driving up inflation, such as start-and-stop work at factories in countries still contending with high rates of COVID-19, could take much of the year to normalize. The ongoing pressure of inflation may also slow the broader recovery that's been visible in declining unemployment and rising economic output rates.
Phil Lempert, editor of Supermarketguru.com, expects food prices to continue rising for another 12 to 18 months.
"They're not going to go down after that. We have the cheapest food supply in the world, which is great. It's spoiled us," he said. "The days of these really cheap foods is over, in my opinion."
He pointed to climate change as a future threat, noting global potato shortages and floods in Brazil impacting coffee production.
At Almich's Markets, a pound of ground beef runs $4.69 versus $3.99 a year earlier. A 12-pack of Coke now goes for $7.29 versus $6.49 a year ago. Unlike larger corporate grocery stores in the Twin Cities, Almich said stores like his always face higher costs on average than large retailers that buy bigger volumes.
"Being the only grocery store in these small towns means being able to survive is essential," he said.
nickname unavailable
Jan 29, 2022, 11:41:01 PM1/29/22
to
New report on Midwest 'factory towns' shakes up the way we look at politics
Trump was highly in tune with the frustration and invisibility felt by communities hard-hit by manufacturing job losses.
Trump mentioned NAFTA eight times in his first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016
dead silence out of the free trader who was so worried about the poor and farmers under trumps "TARIFFS"
wages exceeded inflation for 3 tears under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/new-report-midwest-factory-towns-shakes-way-we-look-politics
Views
New report on Midwest 'factory towns' shakes up the way we look at politics
Oct 11, 2021
by Michael Sean Winters
Opinion
Politics
Mirro_Factory_Demolition-_Manitowoc,_WI_-_Flickr_-_MichaelSteeber_(36) CROP.jpg
The Mirro Aluminum Company factory, which operated until 2003 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, is demolished in 2017. (Wikimedia Commons/Michael Steeber)
The Mirro Aluminum Company factory, which operated until 2003 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, is demolished in 2017. (Wikimedia Commons/Michael Steeber)
A very important think tank study was just issued and it is a must-read for everyone interested in politics. "Factory Towns," a report from the organizations American Family Voices and 21st Century Democrats, examines where the Democrats have lost ground since the 2012 election in 10 Midwestern states.
Control of the White House and the Congress rests with the ability to win in these states and, as the report indicated, to win specifically in these "factory towns." This report should change the way we think about how elections are won and lost in these states.
The report suggests that in addition to the usual breakdown of urban, suburban and rural voting patterns, most of the change has occurred in two kinds of towns that do not really fit any of those categories, at least in the Great Lakes region and Midwest. Towns with fewer than 35,000 people in which manufacturing was once a principal source of employment are "small factory towns," and those with more than 35,000 but not attached to a large metropolitan area are the "midsized factory towns."
Sit down before you go on because the next statistic should knock you off your feet. The report examined seven swing states — Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and two more partisan states — Illinois and Indiana — as well as 48 counties in upstate New York. Those who live in the "factory towns" account for 46% of the electorate in those states. And, between 2012 and 2020, while Democrats were increasing their margins in the urban and suburban areas of the Midwest by some 540,929 and 506,448 votes respectively, in the midsized manufacturing towns the Democrats lost 766,578 and in the small factory towns they lost a stunning 1,868,210.
Both sets of factory town counties, the small and the midsized, accounted for more Democratic losses than the rural areas of these 10 states, which saw 557,206 net decreases for the Democrats. These are hard numbers of actual votes, not polls.
The relationship between manufacturing job losses and changes in political loyalty were pronounced in these factory towns because their economies were less diverse, less able to provide employment alternatives to the manufacturing jobs that went overseas.
The shifts were dramatic. In Trumbull County in Ohio, which lost 68% of its manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2019, the shift in Democratic vote share from 2012 to 2020 was -17%. Manitowoc County in Wisconsin saw a 22% manufacturing job loss over the same period, and the shift in Democratic vote share was -10%. Luzerne County in Pennsylvania, which I have been writing about since 2008, lost 28% of its manufacturing jobs, the most of any county in Pennsylvania, and it swung 10 points to the GOP.
Trump was not lying when he said these workers were forgotten, he was just lying when he said he would do something about it.
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There was also widespread loss of manufacturing jobs in suburban counties during this same time period, but the economies of those counties were and are far more diverse, and other job opportunities presented themselves. So, despite the loss of 156,742 manufacturing jobs in the 40 suburban counties in these 10 states from 2001 to 2019, those counties experienced 19.3% growth for all jobs in the same time period. In the small "factory towns" overall job growth was less than half that, at 9.2%, and in midsized "factory towns," overall job growth was a miserable 3.6%.
Suburbs were not devastated as communities the way the small and midsized communities were by the loss in manufacturing jobs, and that difference shows up in voter behavior. Twenty-eight of the 40 suburban counties saw Democrats gain strength between 2012 compared to only 12 where Republicans did.
The report concludes:
Job losses on their own don't always cause sizable shifts in political support — after all, these manufacturing job losses happened over 20 years under Democratic and Republican administrations. But when the anger of job losses and community down-spirals is paired with a candidate presenting himself as an economic populist and a champion of the little guy, partisan support can shift quickly and significantly.
Unlike Mitt Romney in 2012, Donald Trump was highly in tune with the frustration and invisibility felt by communities hard-hit by manufacturing job losses. In plain language over the course of five years, he hammered on unfair trade deals that cost American jobs. He positioned himself as standing up to China, both verbally and with punitive tariffs. He also offered up foreigners as easy economic scapegoats.
The report recalls that Trump mentioned NAFTA eight times in his first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and "unfair trade deals" nine times. He told these people they had been forgotten, and the neoliberal policies, which President George W. Bush promoted and President Barack Obama failed to jettison, did indeed forget about these workers in the relentless drive to find the lowest possible wages at home or abroad.
Trump was not lying when he said they were forgotten, he was just lying when he said he would do something about it.
The report goes on to examine the ways health declined once the jobs went. Using metrics from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps that track a variety of health outcomes, not just access to affordable care, researchers found that the midsized factory towns saw their health outcomes decline by 5.7% in the last decade, and the larger the decline, the larger the shift to the GOP in the voting booth. Interestingly, they report that health outcomes in the small factory towns actually improved by 0.3%.
A third section shows the drop-off in unionization in the factory towns, which is part of the explanation for the decline in Democratic voting. Unions have long been the engine of progressive politics in the Midwest, and the region surveyed accounted for 93% of the nationwide decline in union jobs in the past decade.
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The final section of the report examines race, and the results are not pretty. More diverse factory towns were less likely to see a vote shift away from the Democrats than those that were disproportionately white. The racist dog whistles worked.
The report does not seek to answer the more difficult and troubling question: Did the economic uncertainty make the appeal to racism more likely to succeed, or was the racism there all the time?
Such questions may be answered by historians, but politicians need something now, and so they will offer theories that serve their political ideology. What we do know is that Obama won Iowa twice before Trump won it twice, and of all 10 states surveyed, Iowa had the most factory towns, accounting for 65% of the electorate in the Hawkeye state.
Perhaps that flip was mere backlash but I suspect a more likely explanation will be that the charismatic Obama appealed to Iowans' better angels, and the charismatic Trump to their worst angels, and in this media-heavy age, charisma counts more than moral argument every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I asked John Pouland, who serves on the advisory board for 21st Century Democrats, about the influence of religion on voters' attitudes in these factory towns. "You know, the study did not go into religious views, but there is data out there that demonstrates there is a higher degree of religiosity in these communities," he told NCR.
Pouland addressed the success of the GOP in messaging. "When Jesus wanted to help the poor, he was considered a savior, but now if you try and help the poor, you are considered a socialist. And that rubs some people wrong," he said. "This study did not get into that per se, but there are people in these communities that share economic concerns who would be receptive to Democrats reaching out to them. They care about people, about their neighbors, and they worry about efforts to dismantle their health care."
Currently, and for the foreseeable future, there is no road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that does not run through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Michigan and Wisconsin were both decided by whiskers the past two elections. The 10 states surveyed account for one-fifth of the U.S. Senate.
Every Democratic Party strategist and fundraiser and activist should study these findings. And every Democrat in Congress should make sure they vote for the two infrastructure bills that might bring jobs back to some of these hard-hit areas!
It is sad to realize so many Americans fell for Trump's strongman nonsense. The Democrats need to find ways to bring jobs and dignity back to these factory towns, or they will lose.
Trump was highly in tune with the frustration and invisibility felt by communities hard-hit by manufacturing job losses.
Trump mentioned NAFTA eight times in his first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016
dead silence out of the free trader who was so worried about the poor and farmers under trumps "TARIFFS"
wages exceeded inflation for 3 tears under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Views
New report on Midwest 'factory towns' shakes up the way we look at politics
Oct 11, 2021
by Michael Sean Winters
Opinion
Politics
Mirro_Factory_Demolition-_Manitowoc,_WI_-_Flickr_-_MichaelSteeber_(36) CROP.jpg
The Mirro Aluminum Company factory, which operated until 2003 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, is demolished in 2017. (Wikimedia Commons/Michael Steeber)
The Mirro Aluminum Company factory, which operated until 2003 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, is demolished in 2017. (Wikimedia Commons/Michael Steeber)
A very important think tank study was just issued and it is a must-read for everyone interested in politics. "Factory Towns," a report from the organizations American Family Voices and 21st Century Democrats, examines where the Democrats have lost ground since the 2012 election in 10 Midwestern states.
Control of the White House and the Congress rests with the ability to win in these states and, as the report indicated, to win specifically in these "factory towns." This report should change the way we think about how elections are won and lost in these states.
The report suggests that in addition to the usual breakdown of urban, suburban and rural voting patterns, most of the change has occurred in two kinds of towns that do not really fit any of those categories, at least in the Great Lakes region and Midwest. Towns with fewer than 35,000 people in which manufacturing was once a principal source of employment are "small factory towns," and those with more than 35,000 but not attached to a large metropolitan area are the "midsized factory towns."
Sit down before you go on because the next statistic should knock you off your feet. The report examined seven swing states — Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and two more partisan states — Illinois and Indiana — as well as 48 counties in upstate New York. Those who live in the "factory towns" account for 46% of the electorate in those states. And, between 2012 and 2020, while Democrats were increasing their margins in the urban and suburban areas of the Midwest by some 540,929 and 506,448 votes respectively, in the midsized manufacturing towns the Democrats lost 766,578 and in the small factory towns they lost a stunning 1,868,210.
Both sets of factory town counties, the small and the midsized, accounted for more Democratic losses than the rural areas of these 10 states, which saw 557,206 net decreases for the Democrats. These are hard numbers of actual votes, not polls.
The relationship between manufacturing job losses and changes in political loyalty were pronounced in these factory towns because their economies were less diverse, less able to provide employment alternatives to the manufacturing jobs that went overseas.
The shifts were dramatic. In Trumbull County in Ohio, which lost 68% of its manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2019, the shift in Democratic vote share from 2012 to 2020 was -17%. Manitowoc County in Wisconsin saw a 22% manufacturing job loss over the same period, and the shift in Democratic vote share was -10%. Luzerne County in Pennsylvania, which I have been writing about since 2008, lost 28% of its manufacturing jobs, the most of any county in Pennsylvania, and it swung 10 points to the GOP.
Trump was not lying when he said these workers were forgotten, he was just lying when he said he would do something about it.
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There was also widespread loss of manufacturing jobs in suburban counties during this same time period, but the economies of those counties were and are far more diverse, and other job opportunities presented themselves. So, despite the loss of 156,742 manufacturing jobs in the 40 suburban counties in these 10 states from 2001 to 2019, those counties experienced 19.3% growth for all jobs in the same time period. In the small "factory towns" overall job growth was less than half that, at 9.2%, and in midsized "factory towns," overall job growth was a miserable 3.6%.
Suburbs were not devastated as communities the way the small and midsized communities were by the loss in manufacturing jobs, and that difference shows up in voter behavior. Twenty-eight of the 40 suburban counties saw Democrats gain strength between 2012 compared to only 12 where Republicans did.
The report concludes:
Job losses on their own don't always cause sizable shifts in political support — after all, these manufacturing job losses happened over 20 years under Democratic and Republican administrations. But when the anger of job losses and community down-spirals is paired with a candidate presenting himself as an economic populist and a champion of the little guy, partisan support can shift quickly and significantly.
Unlike Mitt Romney in 2012, Donald Trump was highly in tune with the frustration and invisibility felt by communities hard-hit by manufacturing job losses. In plain language over the course of five years, he hammered on unfair trade deals that cost American jobs. He positioned himself as standing up to China, both verbally and with punitive tariffs. He also offered up foreigners as easy economic scapegoats.
The report recalls that Trump mentioned NAFTA eight times in his first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and "unfair trade deals" nine times. He told these people they had been forgotten, and the neoliberal policies, which President George W. Bush promoted and President Barack Obama failed to jettison, did indeed forget about these workers in the relentless drive to find the lowest possible wages at home or abroad.
Trump was not lying when he said they were forgotten, he was just lying when he said he would do something about it.
The report goes on to examine the ways health declined once the jobs went. Using metrics from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps that track a variety of health outcomes, not just access to affordable care, researchers found that the midsized factory towns saw their health outcomes decline by 5.7% in the last decade, and the larger the decline, the larger the shift to the GOP in the voting booth. Interestingly, they report that health outcomes in the small factory towns actually improved by 0.3%.
A third section shows the drop-off in unionization in the factory towns, which is part of the explanation for the decline in Democratic voting. Unions have long been the engine of progressive politics in the Midwest, and the region surveyed accounted for 93% of the nationwide decline in union jobs in the past decade.
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The final section of the report examines race, and the results are not pretty. More diverse factory towns were less likely to see a vote shift away from the Democrats than those that were disproportionately white. The racist dog whistles worked.
The report does not seek to answer the more difficult and troubling question: Did the economic uncertainty make the appeal to racism more likely to succeed, or was the racism there all the time?
Such questions may be answered by historians, but politicians need something now, and so they will offer theories that serve their political ideology. What we do know is that Obama won Iowa twice before Trump won it twice, and of all 10 states surveyed, Iowa had the most factory towns, accounting for 65% of the electorate in the Hawkeye state.
Perhaps that flip was mere backlash but I suspect a more likely explanation will be that the charismatic Obama appealed to Iowans' better angels, and the charismatic Trump to their worst angels, and in this media-heavy age, charisma counts more than moral argument every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
I asked John Pouland, who serves on the advisory board for 21st Century Democrats, about the influence of religion on voters' attitudes in these factory towns. "You know, the study did not go into religious views, but there is data out there that demonstrates there is a higher degree of religiosity in these communities," he told NCR.
Pouland addressed the success of the GOP in messaging. "When Jesus wanted to help the poor, he was considered a savior, but now if you try and help the poor, you are considered a socialist. And that rubs some people wrong," he said. "This study did not get into that per se, but there are people in these communities that share economic concerns who would be receptive to Democrats reaching out to them. They care about people, about their neighbors, and they worry about efforts to dismantle their health care."
Currently, and for the foreseeable future, there is no road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that does not run through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Michigan and Wisconsin were both decided by whiskers the past two elections. The 10 states surveyed account for one-fifth of the U.S. Senate.
Every Democratic Party strategist and fundraiser and activist should study these findings. And every Democrat in Congress should make sure they vote for the two infrastructure bills that might bring jobs back to some of these hard-hit areas!
It is sad to realize so many Americans fell for Trump's strongman nonsense. The Democrats need to find ways to bring jobs and dignity back to these factory towns, or they will lose.
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Jan 30, 2022, 5:39:15 PM1/30/22
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Free Trade, War and Debt: All Branches of the Same Tree
The American colonists understood this in a very visceral way.
For example, Benjamin Franklin once remarked that there are only three ways a nation can become wealthy. (1) It can engage in war and war profiteering. (2) It can reap unearned profits through exploitation of wage and price differentials, under cover of “free” trade. OR (3) It can create new, earned wealth through a balanced domestic exchange economy(protectionism).
wages exceeded inflation for 3 years under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
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The State of Israel vs. the Jews Sylvain Cypel
Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military Yves Engler
The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump Clifford D Conner
Evermore Mihaela Melnic and Scott Thomas Outlar
Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media Milton Allimadi
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance Rashid Khalidi
No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World Michael Albert
More books »
Free Trade, War and Debt: All Branches of the Same Tree
by Geraldine Perry / June 30th, 2017
Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government – along with the rest of the world – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.
The American colonists understood this in a very visceral way. For example, Benjamin Franklin once remarked that there are only three ways a nation can become wealthy. (1) It can engage in war and war profiteering. (2) It can reap unearned profits through exploitation of wage and price differentials, under cover of “free” trade. OR (3) It can create new, earned wealth through a balanced domestic exchange economy.
Franklin, like the other colonists, knew whereof he spoke, having witnessed firsthand the shenanigans of the British East India Company, which not only began using slave labor for its operations by the 1620’s but which required England to continually bail it out, heaping extra debt on the English people and forcing England to look for tax revenue from her increasingly disgruntled American colonies.
But bailing out the East India Company was not the real reason why England was in debt. That state of affairs must be attributed to the fact that England had, in 1666, relinquished her prerogative to issue the nation’s money – a prerogative sanctified by the world famous Mix’t Moneys case of 1604. Instead of maintaining that prerogative for the benefit of her people, England was persuaded, through bribery, intrigue and various forms of subterfuge to surrender that prerogative over to private hands – those hands being those of the British East India company, through the Mint Act of 1666.
The East India Company thus was given the right to coin – or issue – its own money, allowing it to reap handsome profits for the privilege. Still not satisfied, the merchants of the Company, together with London bankers, then instigated the creation of the Bank of England and a permanent national debt along with a method for expanding the private debt of England’s citizens, all to the financial advantage of these private interests. . .
The “money question” which the East India Company had seized for the benefit of itself and not the public was the actual source of England’s growing debt, and the reason behind her endless wars waged on behalf of commerce.
The British East India company was created in 1600 by charter from Queen Elizabeth, for the purpose of plundering the planet. To carry out this deed, England also provided the British East India Company with military and financial support, forcing the government to bail the Company out a number of times before 1800, thereby helping it to eventually build its very own empire in India. British colonialism carried out by the East India Company was brutal, and included the forceful seizure of land and deposing of rulers. It also included taxes and loyalty tributes that were extracted from average citizens through methods that included torture.
The deeper in debt England became the harder she looked for revenues – with her own people being among those most imposed upon. Jefferson comments in an 1816 letter to Wm. H. Crawford, and in so doing he almost eerily predicted today’s multiple crises:
No earthly consideration could induce my consent to contract such a debt as England has by her wars for commerce, to reduce our citizens by taxes to such wretchedness, as that laboring sixteen of the twenty-four hours, they are still unable to afford themselves bread, or barely to earn as much oatmeal or potatoes as will keep soul and body together. And all this to feed the avidity of a few millionary merchants and to keep up one thousand ships of war for the protection of their commercial speculations.
The problem, as Jefferson and company could see, was that England had chosen to elevate herself above all other nations based on John Locke’s philosophy called “the rights of conquest” and so was dependent upon the plundering and pillaging of the British East India Company. With England’s cooperation, the Company was, by 1800, supporting its very own army of 200,000 – more than most European states at the time. It also had begun financing its tea trade with illegal opium exports to China, eventually igniting the infamous Opium Wars.
The company also established its own feeder college in 1806, known as Haileybury College or East India College, for the express purpose of staffing the Empire. It trained the soldiers, businessmen, and missionaries – and by these means it came to inventory the planet and its resources. The man in charge was the head of the Department of Economics, one Thomas Robert Malthus, philosopher and a minister of Christian Doctrine.
Malthus had a population theory based on the idea that the planet would be overtaxed with population. New life, he held, expanded geometrically, whereas the food supply acquired new efficiency only on an arithmetic basis. Therefore some life was superfluous. Malthus was soon joined by followers of Charles Darwin, who argued for survival of the fittest. The fittest had divine right to survive.
This was the philosophy that set the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and finally the English on a course of conquest until each coveted acre, each sandbar, each spit of land on earth was accounted for. One might say that our modern-day CIA Fact Book, which can be viewed online, has taken over this task, but I digress.
It was at the juncture during which the slave trade was just expanding, around the mid-1700s, that the talent scouts of what was to become Haileybury College availed themselves of the services of a Scottish gentlemen by the name of Adam Smith, who fit into the mental prototype for the East India company’s enslavement pursuits. Smith was in effect made an intellectual prostitute. In his well-known Wealth of Nations, Smith posits a deceptively appealing argument in favor of “free” trade by warning against the necessity of domestic producers seeking protectionism. Smith might just as well have been called the father of “Free” trade as the father of modern economics.
In due course the English pronounced expendable any population they could bully. Except for Continental wars, the British rarely fought an enemy that wore shoes, the American colonies excepted… A certain mindset thus developed among the world’s leading countries which held that it was the role of a few traders to control manufacturing for the entire world and to monopolize its reproductive power; and – as one historian put it – to keep all other countries in a state of industrial vassalage.
Given all this is it any wonder that Thomas Jefferson, expressing the views of his allies and compatriots, would write in 1815 that he hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” The banks, for Jefferson, were the corporations of utmost concern.
You might say that all of this proves that history may rhyme, as Mark Twain famously said, but history also repeats.
It’s no secret that war is very good for business, but war is also good for “free” trade advocates – who always include the multinational corporations and by extension the investment class and most importantly the banks – who in point of fact make it all happen. Smedley Butler may have said it best in his 1935 book appropriately titled War Is a Racket:
I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . For a great many years as a soldier I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out. Again [the nations of the world] are choosing sides. . . All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people, not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
Recall that this book was written in 1935, but I digress again.
The untold truth is that America consigned herself to endless and ever-escalating “wars of commerce” the moment she followed in the steps of England by handing over her prerogative to issue the nation’s money to the private banking and financial interests in 1913. Those private interests then moved to further coalesce their profits and consolidate their power through an integrated world system of finance under the structures created by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945 – all built on the fact that, by that time, most nations of the world had relinquished their right – and responsibility as sanctified by the Mix’t Moneys case of 1604 – to coin (or create) their own money for the benefit of the people and not private interests.
Today, the world economic system actively and aggressively promotes military economies over civilian economies, relentlessly and increasingly pushing national economic policies toward military spending. Globalization, through a long parade of so-called “free” trade agreements, has seriously weakened the powers of even the most powerful nations on earth while at the same time freeing corporations to move profits and operations across national boundaries. As Jefferson foresaw, and as the East India company foreshadowed, corporate interests now dominate those of the state.
Popular New York columnist Thomas Friedman somewhat inadvertently characterized the strategic relationship that has developed between corporations and militaries when he famously remarked that “the hidden hand of the [“free”] market cannot flourish without a hidden fist.” Predictably, the reach along with the strategies and techniques employed by that hidden fist have been greatly refined and extended since the days of the East India Company.
For example, corporations no longer have their own private armies. Instead they employ the services of multinational corporations such as Dyncorp, KBR, the British Erinys International, Asia International and Blackwater, currently known as “Academi.”
These and similar companies offer their services on the world market, services that include risk advisory, training of local forces, armed site security, cash transport, intelligence services, workplace and building security, war zone security needs, weapons procurement, armed support, air support, logistical support, maritime security, cyber security, personnel and budget vetting, weapons destruction, prisons, surveillance, propaganda tactics, psychological warfare, covert operations, close protection and investigations.
How, it may be asked, do we talk ourselves into financing – i.e. going into debt – for all this stuff?
Surprisingly the services of these companies are used not only by governments around the world but also by corporations, humanitarian groups and NGOs, media personnel, and the UN. Moreover, the conflict in Iraq led to an unprecedented proliferation of private military companies and nonmilitary contractors.
Today, contractors make up a second, private army that’s larger than the entire U.S. military force. Some estimates suggest that more than 180,000 individual contractors of many nationalities work for the U.S. government in Iraq, doing an assortment of jobs for which the U.S. has paid more than $100 billion. While private military companies represent a worldwide phenomena, the United States and Great Britain – predictably – account for over 70% of the world’s market for the services of these private military services companies.
Then we have the international arms trade, which is considered to be one of the three most corrupt businesses in the world. And reminiscent of the British East India Company, open slave markets have begun to appear in Libya, this at the same time that women in Bangladesh are selling their organs to pay off their internationally financed micro-loans and farmers in India routinely commit suicide because they cannot pay their debt to Monsanto and company. Examples go on and on.
All of this and more is the direct result of overwhelming debt among nations that have relinquished their prerogative to coin (or create) money for the public advantage and instead have handed it over to private hands. Most of the resulting debt is financed by the international investment banks, including those of the World Bank Group created out of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1945.
Meanwhile, as our own local police get “weaponed up” with things like Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, battering rams, armored vehicles and much more, more and more state and local governments are being forced into bankruptcy. Other governmental entities manage to escape at least temporarily by simply finding ways to pay higher interest and insurance rates as they float more bond debt to remain in operation.
Still others look for ways to “privatize” public assets – an arrangement that allows government and business to co-own a former public asset which had been built by you and me – with associated fee structures locking out the disadvantaged and squeezing the middle class. These arrangements, known as PPP or public/private partnership projects, are made by investment bankers around the globe, who themselves are rushing to benefit from the tidy fees they know will be realized through the privatization of all manner of public infrastructure including highways, water departments, schools, prisons and more.
As the British East India company showed, control over money creation and credit is an integral part of economic conquest; it is the basis upon which countries are colonized. A recent article in the online ZeroHedge showed that about 80% of the population are net payers of interest, due to the fact that the cost of interest is always embedded within the cost of the products we buy. The other 20% of the population are net receivers of interest, and of that 20% only 4% receive most of the interest on our cumulative debt. All of which means that the wealthy own interest-yielding assets, while the rest of us owe interest on the debt. This fact alone explains how and why the system as it stands produces the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. It also is the reason why our national debt hovers around $20 trillion, give or take a trillion or two, and our private debt hovers around $57 trillion, give or take a trillion or two.
Obviously more debt will not resolve debt. The assets created by our labor cannot simultaneously be a liability we owe to ourselves at interest. At the core of it all is that we have entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity – and have instead been persuaded by the best prostituted intellectuals and academics that money can buy to believe that the best way to prosperity is to become an interest receiver.
Nearly buried in the trash heap of history, a team of like-minded and highly credentialed raw materials economists uncovered a natural law of physics and arithmetic that helped them prove beyond all doubt that raw materials income, particularly that of agriculture, governed national income unless the latter was expanded by debt. Their data also made it clear that when trade is expanded beyond what the nation itself can consume, the internal domestic U.S. economy is destabilized. This is the process by which, as Charles Walters said, the nation that degrades either the production or the income of its agriculture through “free” trade thereby condemns itself to war.
Suggested Resource:1
“The Untold Story of the American Struggle Against the Money Power” with a selected list of references provided in the last slide [↩]
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Geraldine Perry is the co-author of The Two Faces of Money and author of Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy: The New Trifecta. Read other articles by Geraldine, or visit Geraldine's website.
This article was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2017 at 5:12pm and is filed
The American colonists understood this in a very visceral way.
For example, Benjamin Franklin once remarked that there are only three ways a nation can become wealthy. (1) It can engage in war and war profiteering. (2) It can reap unearned profits through exploitation of wage and price differentials, under cover of “free” trade. OR (3) It can create new, earned wealth through a balanced domestic exchange economy(protectionism).
wages exceeded inflation for 3 years under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Skip to content
About DV Archives Donate Contact Us Submissions Books Links
Browse by Topic
Poetry on Sunday
Latest Articles
An architect
Roger Stoll / 01/30/2022
Child of God
Melissa A. Chappell / 01/30/2022
Springtime in Paris
John Drudge / 01/30/2022
The Fire Women
Paul Tristram / 01/30/2022
Sentido do Solimões
T.P. Wilkinson / 01/30/2022
Soil Flora Fauna Fecundity
Paul Haeder / 01/30/2022
Spoiled Meat
Scott Thomas Outlar / 01/30/2022
Real Notes
Richard Fenton Sederstrom / 01/30/2022
no fucking win
Rob Plath / 01/30/2022
World War Three
Jim Hanson / 01/30/2022
Recommended Reading
America and the China Threat: From the End of History to the End of Empire Paolo Urio
World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields A.B. Abrams
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The State of Israel vs. the Jews Sylvain Cypel
Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military Yves Engler
The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump Clifford D Conner
Evermore Mihaela Melnic and Scott Thomas Outlar
Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media Milton Allimadi
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance Rashid Khalidi
No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World Michael Albert
More books »
Free Trade, War and Debt: All Branches of the Same Tree
by Geraldine Perry / June 30th, 2017
Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government – along with the rest of the world – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.
The American colonists understood this in a very visceral way. For example, Benjamin Franklin once remarked that there are only three ways a nation can become wealthy. (1) It can engage in war and war profiteering. (2) It can reap unearned profits through exploitation of wage and price differentials, under cover of “free” trade. OR (3) It can create new, earned wealth through a balanced domestic exchange economy.
Franklin, like the other colonists, knew whereof he spoke, having witnessed firsthand the shenanigans of the British East India Company, which not only began using slave labor for its operations by the 1620’s but which required England to continually bail it out, heaping extra debt on the English people and forcing England to look for tax revenue from her increasingly disgruntled American colonies.
But bailing out the East India Company was not the real reason why England was in debt. That state of affairs must be attributed to the fact that England had, in 1666, relinquished her prerogative to issue the nation’s money – a prerogative sanctified by the world famous Mix’t Moneys case of 1604. Instead of maintaining that prerogative for the benefit of her people, England was persuaded, through bribery, intrigue and various forms of subterfuge to surrender that prerogative over to private hands – those hands being those of the British East India company, through the Mint Act of 1666.
The East India Company thus was given the right to coin – or issue – its own money, allowing it to reap handsome profits for the privilege. Still not satisfied, the merchants of the Company, together with London bankers, then instigated the creation of the Bank of England and a permanent national debt along with a method for expanding the private debt of England’s citizens, all to the financial advantage of these private interests. . .
The “money question” which the East India Company had seized for the benefit of itself and not the public was the actual source of England’s growing debt, and the reason behind her endless wars waged on behalf of commerce.
The British East India company was created in 1600 by charter from Queen Elizabeth, for the purpose of plundering the planet. To carry out this deed, England also provided the British East India Company with military and financial support, forcing the government to bail the Company out a number of times before 1800, thereby helping it to eventually build its very own empire in India. British colonialism carried out by the East India Company was brutal, and included the forceful seizure of land and deposing of rulers. It also included taxes and loyalty tributes that were extracted from average citizens through methods that included torture.
The deeper in debt England became the harder she looked for revenues – with her own people being among those most imposed upon. Jefferson comments in an 1816 letter to Wm. H. Crawford, and in so doing he almost eerily predicted today’s multiple crises:
No earthly consideration could induce my consent to contract such a debt as England has by her wars for commerce, to reduce our citizens by taxes to such wretchedness, as that laboring sixteen of the twenty-four hours, they are still unable to afford themselves bread, or barely to earn as much oatmeal or potatoes as will keep soul and body together. And all this to feed the avidity of a few millionary merchants and to keep up one thousand ships of war for the protection of their commercial speculations.
The problem, as Jefferson and company could see, was that England had chosen to elevate herself above all other nations based on John Locke’s philosophy called “the rights of conquest” and so was dependent upon the plundering and pillaging of the British East India Company. With England’s cooperation, the Company was, by 1800, supporting its very own army of 200,000 – more than most European states at the time. It also had begun financing its tea trade with illegal opium exports to China, eventually igniting the infamous Opium Wars.
The company also established its own feeder college in 1806, known as Haileybury College or East India College, for the express purpose of staffing the Empire. It trained the soldiers, businessmen, and missionaries – and by these means it came to inventory the planet and its resources. The man in charge was the head of the Department of Economics, one Thomas Robert Malthus, philosopher and a minister of Christian Doctrine.
Malthus had a population theory based on the idea that the planet would be overtaxed with population. New life, he held, expanded geometrically, whereas the food supply acquired new efficiency only on an arithmetic basis. Therefore some life was superfluous. Malthus was soon joined by followers of Charles Darwin, who argued for survival of the fittest. The fittest had divine right to survive.
This was the philosophy that set the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and finally the English on a course of conquest until each coveted acre, each sandbar, each spit of land on earth was accounted for. One might say that our modern-day CIA Fact Book, which can be viewed online, has taken over this task, but I digress.
It was at the juncture during which the slave trade was just expanding, around the mid-1700s, that the talent scouts of what was to become Haileybury College availed themselves of the services of a Scottish gentlemen by the name of Adam Smith, who fit into the mental prototype for the East India company’s enslavement pursuits. Smith was in effect made an intellectual prostitute. In his well-known Wealth of Nations, Smith posits a deceptively appealing argument in favor of “free” trade by warning against the necessity of domestic producers seeking protectionism. Smith might just as well have been called the father of “Free” trade as the father of modern economics.
In due course the English pronounced expendable any population they could bully. Except for Continental wars, the British rarely fought an enemy that wore shoes, the American colonies excepted… A certain mindset thus developed among the world’s leading countries which held that it was the role of a few traders to control manufacturing for the entire world and to monopolize its reproductive power; and – as one historian put it – to keep all other countries in a state of industrial vassalage.
Given all this is it any wonder that Thomas Jefferson, expressing the views of his allies and compatriots, would write in 1815 that he hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” The banks, for Jefferson, were the corporations of utmost concern.
You might say that all of this proves that history may rhyme, as Mark Twain famously said, but history also repeats.
It’s no secret that war is very good for business, but war is also good for “free” trade advocates – who always include the multinational corporations and by extension the investment class and most importantly the banks – who in point of fact make it all happen. Smedley Butler may have said it best in his 1935 book appropriately titled War Is a Racket:
I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. . . . For a great many years as a soldier I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out. Again [the nations of the world] are choosing sides. . . All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people, not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
Recall that this book was written in 1935, but I digress again.
The untold truth is that America consigned herself to endless and ever-escalating “wars of commerce” the moment she followed in the steps of England by handing over her prerogative to issue the nation’s money to the private banking and financial interests in 1913. Those private interests then moved to further coalesce their profits and consolidate their power through an integrated world system of finance under the structures created by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945 – all built on the fact that, by that time, most nations of the world had relinquished their right – and responsibility as sanctified by the Mix’t Moneys case of 1604 – to coin (or create) their own money for the benefit of the people and not private interests.
Today, the world economic system actively and aggressively promotes military economies over civilian economies, relentlessly and increasingly pushing national economic policies toward military spending. Globalization, through a long parade of so-called “free” trade agreements, has seriously weakened the powers of even the most powerful nations on earth while at the same time freeing corporations to move profits and operations across national boundaries. As Jefferson foresaw, and as the East India company foreshadowed, corporate interests now dominate those of the state.
Popular New York columnist Thomas Friedman somewhat inadvertently characterized the strategic relationship that has developed between corporations and militaries when he famously remarked that “the hidden hand of the [“free”] market cannot flourish without a hidden fist.” Predictably, the reach along with the strategies and techniques employed by that hidden fist have been greatly refined and extended since the days of the East India Company.
For example, corporations no longer have their own private armies. Instead they employ the services of multinational corporations such as Dyncorp, KBR, the British Erinys International, Asia International and Blackwater, currently known as “Academi.”
These and similar companies offer their services on the world market, services that include risk advisory, training of local forces, armed site security, cash transport, intelligence services, workplace and building security, war zone security needs, weapons procurement, armed support, air support, logistical support, maritime security, cyber security, personnel and budget vetting, weapons destruction, prisons, surveillance, propaganda tactics, psychological warfare, covert operations, close protection and investigations.
How, it may be asked, do we talk ourselves into financing – i.e. going into debt – for all this stuff?
Surprisingly the services of these companies are used not only by governments around the world but also by corporations, humanitarian groups and NGOs, media personnel, and the UN. Moreover, the conflict in Iraq led to an unprecedented proliferation of private military companies and nonmilitary contractors.
Today, contractors make up a second, private army that’s larger than the entire U.S. military force. Some estimates suggest that more than 180,000 individual contractors of many nationalities work for the U.S. government in Iraq, doing an assortment of jobs for which the U.S. has paid more than $100 billion. While private military companies represent a worldwide phenomena, the United States and Great Britain – predictably – account for over 70% of the world’s market for the services of these private military services companies.
Then we have the international arms trade, which is considered to be one of the three most corrupt businesses in the world. And reminiscent of the British East India Company, open slave markets have begun to appear in Libya, this at the same time that women in Bangladesh are selling their organs to pay off their internationally financed micro-loans and farmers in India routinely commit suicide because they cannot pay their debt to Monsanto and company. Examples go on and on.
All of this and more is the direct result of overwhelming debt among nations that have relinquished their prerogative to coin (or create) money for the public advantage and instead have handed it over to private hands. Most of the resulting debt is financed by the international investment banks, including those of the World Bank Group created out of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1945.
Meanwhile, as our own local police get “weaponed up” with things like Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, battering rams, armored vehicles and much more, more and more state and local governments are being forced into bankruptcy. Other governmental entities manage to escape at least temporarily by simply finding ways to pay higher interest and insurance rates as they float more bond debt to remain in operation.
Still others look for ways to “privatize” public assets – an arrangement that allows government and business to co-own a former public asset which had been built by you and me – with associated fee structures locking out the disadvantaged and squeezing the middle class. These arrangements, known as PPP or public/private partnership projects, are made by investment bankers around the globe, who themselves are rushing to benefit from the tidy fees they know will be realized through the privatization of all manner of public infrastructure including highways, water departments, schools, prisons and more.
As the British East India company showed, control over money creation and credit is an integral part of economic conquest; it is the basis upon which countries are colonized. A recent article in the online ZeroHedge showed that about 80% of the population are net payers of interest, due to the fact that the cost of interest is always embedded within the cost of the products we buy. The other 20% of the population are net receivers of interest, and of that 20% only 4% receive most of the interest on our cumulative debt. All of which means that the wealthy own interest-yielding assets, while the rest of us owe interest on the debt. This fact alone explains how and why the system as it stands produces the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots. It also is the reason why our national debt hovers around $20 trillion, give or take a trillion or two, and our private debt hovers around $57 trillion, give or take a trillion or two.
Obviously more debt will not resolve debt. The assets created by our labor cannot simultaneously be a liability we owe to ourselves at interest. At the core of it all is that we have entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity – and have instead been persuaded by the best prostituted intellectuals and academics that money can buy to believe that the best way to prosperity is to become an interest receiver.
Nearly buried in the trash heap of history, a team of like-minded and highly credentialed raw materials economists uncovered a natural law of physics and arithmetic that helped them prove beyond all doubt that raw materials income, particularly that of agriculture, governed national income unless the latter was expanded by debt. Their data also made it clear that when trade is expanded beyond what the nation itself can consume, the internal domestic U.S. economy is destabilized. This is the process by which, as Charles Walters said, the nation that degrades either the production or the income of its agriculture through “free” trade thereby condemns itself to war.
Suggested Resource:1
“The Untold Story of the American Struggle Against the Money Power” with a selected list of references provided in the last slide [↩]
Geraldine Perry is the co-author of The Two Faces of Money and author of Climate Change, Land Use and Monetary Policy: The New Trifecta. Read other articles by Geraldine, or visit Geraldine's website.
This article was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2017 at 5:12pm and is filed
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Jan 30, 2022, 10:48:53 PM1/30/22
to
nafta joe biden and nafta buttigeig said it was fixed: Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
i once said to free traders that those double stacked trains always stop themselves(if the victims of nafta billy clintons disastrous free trade policies don't loot them first!), free traders simply do not have the capability to understand this.
Southern California import trends imply that the landside bottleneck situation is getting worse.
wages exceeded inflation for 3 years under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/los-angeles-imports-slump-even-further-as-congestion-throttles-volume
Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
December imports to LA -16% y/y, exports -41%, empties +11%, total volume -10.5%
Greg Miller, Senior Editor Follow on Twitter Thursday, January 27, 2022
FreightWaves
Home/News/Maritime/Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
American ShipperContainerMaritimeNewsShippingTop Stories
Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
December imports to LA -16% y/y, exports -41%, empties +11%, total volume -10.5%
Greg Miller, Senior Editor Follow on Twitter Thursday, January 27, 2022
6 minutes read
container shipping port congestion Los Angeles
Sunset over the Port of Los Angeles (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)
Listen to this article
0:00 / 8:53
BeyondWords
Import volumes to Southern California ports continue to deteriorate, underscoring just how severe the supply chain crisis remains, despite public relations spin to the contrary.
Los Angeles disclosed on Thursday that it handled just 385,251 twenty-foot equivalent units of import cargo in December. That’s down 16% year-on-year and down 18% from December 2018, pre-pandemic.
December marked the fourth month in a row that Los Angeles’ imports fell versus the preceding month; imports were down 4.5% from November and 17.6% from October. December imports were the lowest since June 2020, a month when ocean carriers were canceling sailings to America due to lockdown-depressed demand.
Los Angeles’ December export performance was even worse: Exports were down 41% year on year to 70,872 TEUs, the lowest monthly tally since October 2002, almost two decades ago.
Chart: American Shipper based on data from Port of Los Angeles
Los Angeles’ import slide mirrors the trend at neighboring Long Beach, which reported December results on Jan. 19.
Long Beach handled 358,687 TEUs of imports in December, down 12% year on year and down 1% from November, marking the second straight month of declines.
LA/LB imports as a supply chain indicator
There is now an intense focus on measuring supply chain pressure, particularly given its presumed effect on Federal Reserve policy decisions, and thus tens of trillions of dollars of bets on stocks and bonds.
There is a crowded field of bellwethers on supply chain pressures, ranging from spot rate indexes to a new Fed index to an index measuring transit time. Another way to gauge supply chain pressure, one that is particularly telling: Watch the changes in import volume to Los Angeles/Long Beach, the gateway handling 40% of the country’s inbound containers.
Normally, the LA/LB import tally doesn’t measure supply chain stress, it measures import demand, which fluctuates due to seasonal and economic factors. For the past year, however, there has been a growing armada of container ships anchored or loitering in the Pacific waiting to unload at LA/LB, in addition to vessels going straight to berths that don’t wait in the queue.
More import volume is stuck aboard ships waiting to unload than the two ports handle in a month. Regardless of the level of U.S. consumer demand, the demand for LA/LB terminal handling services now drastically exceeds supply as a result of the backlog — and whether there are 80 ships waiting or 105 ships or 60 has no effect on LA/LB throughput in any given month. (Regardless of the queue size, LA/LB has very consistently had around 28 container ships at its terminal berths each day.)
As a result of the massive offshore backlog, changes in LA/LB container imports are not reflecting month-to-month changes in import demand, they’re reflecting changes in the ability of the LA/LB gateway system to handle inbound volumes from the queue.
Under these circumstances, if LA/LB import volumes rise in a given month versus the preceding month, it indicates that the landside bottleneck situation is alleviating. If LA/LB import volumes fall, it means the landside bottleneck is getting worse.
Import volumes vs. ship capacity in queue
Southern California import trends imply that the landside bottleneck situation — driven by constraints on terminal space, trucking and warehousing — is getting worse.
Combined LA/LB imports totaled 743,938 TEUs in December, down another 3% from November and 13% from October. Combined LA/LB imports haven’t been this low since June 2020.
John McCown, founder of Blue Alpha Capital and publisher of the monthly McCown Container Volume Observer, told American Shipper: “The December data is concerning in terms of both level and trend. LA/LB inbound volume is the lowest it’s been in 18 months. With the readily available backlog, the problems are clearly in the terminals and unfortunately the data indicates the problems are getting worse.”
The effects of congestion can be seen by comparing December’s imports to May’s. In May, when landside bottlenecks weren’t as severe, LA/LB handled a record 980,450 TEUs of imports. From a demand perspective, LA/LB could theoretically have matched that May record in December — after all, there was no shortage of cargo stuck offshore waiting to unload — but due to landside constraints, the LA/LB imports in December were down 236,512 TEUs or 24% versus May.
The capacity stuck in the offshore backlog rose sharply in the second half of 2021.
American Shipper compared the combined monthly import numbers of LA/LB to the TEU capacity of ships waiting in the queue at the end of each month, based on data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California. (Ship capacity is not the same as TEUs of actual cargo on board, but given that ships are sailing full, it’s a strong indicator of actual cargo trends.)
The data reveals that offshore capacity in the queue has continued to escalate, coming in just below LA/LB import volumes in November and then handily exceeding import volumes last month. Between the end of May and the end of December, the queue capacity jumped by almost 650,000 TEUs. (Queue capacity has remained relatively stable through January versus the end of December.)
Chart: American Shipper. LA/LB import data from ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach. Data on total TEU in the queue at the end of the month calculated by American Shipper based on data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California.
A different story
The press releases and media headlines on Los Angeles/Long Beach over the past week painted a different picture than the one shown by falling import and export data.
The recent public relations focus has been on the year-end total throughput number. That number reached an all-time high for 2021 as a result of gains back in the first half.
In its press release, the Port of Long Beach touted the “incredible milestone” of moving 9.38 million TEUs in 2021, up 15.7% from its previous record in 2020. Its December import decline was addressed fleetingly in the last paragraph of the release.
Los Angeles held its annual State of the Port event last Thursday. Executive Director Gene Seroka said at the event: “In 2021, we learned how much cargo we could move through our port under extraordinary circumstances. The Port of Los Angeles processed about 10.7 million TEUs. That’s about 13% more than in 2018, our previous record year.”
No data beyond the total throughput estimate was made available at the time of the State of the Port event. Asked about the import statistics, a Port of Los Angeles spokesperson told American Shipper that “data from one vessel is delaying the final tally.”
On the same day as Los Angeles’ State of the Port event, the White House released its latest update on the port situation. It too focused on the booming full-year results. It said: “2021 was a record year for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which moved more than 10 million import containers. This is a 14% increase over 2020 and a 13% increase over 2018, which held the previous record.”
The White House’s twice-monthly port reports have always cited LA/LB imports as a key performance indicator, but when quantifying changes, the White House has always featured year-to-date changes, which in practice hide more recent monthly setbacks behind earlier gains.
Combined import data from LA/LB confirm that last year’s record results were entirely driven by outperformance in the first half.
Chart: American Shipper based on data from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach
Unlike in prior months, the Port of Los Angeles did not issue a press release detailing its final December numbers, but instead quietly added them to its statistics page. Seven days passed between Los Angeles’ State of the Port address and the White House release and the eventual posting of final December statistics showing the deteriorating import and export numbers.
In the interim, the media reported: “Port of Los Angeles breaks cargo record in 2021” … “Record year for Port of Los Angeles” … “Ports move record amounts of cargo in 2021” … “Port of Los Angeles has busiest year on record as imports surge during COVID.” The headlines focused on the positive spin.
i once said to free traders that those double stacked trains always stop themselves(if the victims of nafta billy clintons disastrous free trade policies don't loot them first!), free traders simply do not have the capability to understand this.
Southern California import trends imply that the landside bottleneck situation is getting worse.
wages exceeded inflation for 3 years under trump, me thinks that was the real reason for the "TARIFF" hysteria:)
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
December imports to LA -16% y/y, exports -41%, empties +11%, total volume -10.5%
Greg Miller, Senior Editor Follow on Twitter Thursday, January 27, 2022
FreightWaves
Home/News/Maritime/Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
American ShipperContainerMaritimeNewsShippingTop Stories
Los Angeles imports slump further as congestion throttles volume
December imports to LA -16% y/y, exports -41%, empties +11%, total volume -10.5%
Greg Miller, Senior Editor Follow on Twitter Thursday, January 27, 2022
6 minutes read
container shipping port congestion Los Angeles
Sunset over the Port of Los Angeles (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)
Listen to this article
0:00 / 8:53
BeyondWords
Import volumes to Southern California ports continue to deteriorate, underscoring just how severe the supply chain crisis remains, despite public relations spin to the contrary.
Los Angeles disclosed on Thursday that it handled just 385,251 twenty-foot equivalent units of import cargo in December. That’s down 16% year-on-year and down 18% from December 2018, pre-pandemic.
December marked the fourth month in a row that Los Angeles’ imports fell versus the preceding month; imports were down 4.5% from November and 17.6% from October. December imports were the lowest since June 2020, a month when ocean carriers were canceling sailings to America due to lockdown-depressed demand.
Los Angeles’ December export performance was even worse: Exports were down 41% year on year to 70,872 TEUs, the lowest monthly tally since October 2002, almost two decades ago.
Chart: American Shipper based on data from Port of Los Angeles
Los Angeles’ import slide mirrors the trend at neighboring Long Beach, which reported December results on Jan. 19.
Long Beach handled 358,687 TEUs of imports in December, down 12% year on year and down 1% from November, marking the second straight month of declines.
LA/LB imports as a supply chain indicator
There is now an intense focus on measuring supply chain pressure, particularly given its presumed effect on Federal Reserve policy decisions, and thus tens of trillions of dollars of bets on stocks and bonds.
There is a crowded field of bellwethers on supply chain pressures, ranging from spot rate indexes to a new Fed index to an index measuring transit time. Another way to gauge supply chain pressure, one that is particularly telling: Watch the changes in import volume to Los Angeles/Long Beach, the gateway handling 40% of the country’s inbound containers.
Normally, the LA/LB import tally doesn’t measure supply chain stress, it measures import demand, which fluctuates due to seasonal and economic factors. For the past year, however, there has been a growing armada of container ships anchored or loitering in the Pacific waiting to unload at LA/LB, in addition to vessels going straight to berths that don’t wait in the queue.
More import volume is stuck aboard ships waiting to unload than the two ports handle in a month. Regardless of the level of U.S. consumer demand, the demand for LA/LB terminal handling services now drastically exceeds supply as a result of the backlog — and whether there are 80 ships waiting or 105 ships or 60 has no effect on LA/LB throughput in any given month. (Regardless of the queue size, LA/LB has very consistently had around 28 container ships at its terminal berths each day.)
As a result of the massive offshore backlog, changes in LA/LB container imports are not reflecting month-to-month changes in import demand, they’re reflecting changes in the ability of the LA/LB gateway system to handle inbound volumes from the queue.
Under these circumstances, if LA/LB import volumes rise in a given month versus the preceding month, it indicates that the landside bottleneck situation is alleviating. If LA/LB import volumes fall, it means the landside bottleneck is getting worse.
Import volumes vs. ship capacity in queue
Southern California import trends imply that the landside bottleneck situation — driven by constraints on terminal space, trucking and warehousing — is getting worse.
Combined LA/LB imports totaled 743,938 TEUs in December, down another 3% from November and 13% from October. Combined LA/LB imports haven’t been this low since June 2020.
John McCown, founder of Blue Alpha Capital and publisher of the monthly McCown Container Volume Observer, told American Shipper: “The December data is concerning in terms of both level and trend. LA/LB inbound volume is the lowest it’s been in 18 months. With the readily available backlog, the problems are clearly in the terminals and unfortunately the data indicates the problems are getting worse.”
The effects of congestion can be seen by comparing December’s imports to May’s. In May, when landside bottlenecks weren’t as severe, LA/LB handled a record 980,450 TEUs of imports. From a demand perspective, LA/LB could theoretically have matched that May record in December — after all, there was no shortage of cargo stuck offshore waiting to unload — but due to landside constraints, the LA/LB imports in December were down 236,512 TEUs or 24% versus May.
The capacity stuck in the offshore backlog rose sharply in the second half of 2021.
American Shipper compared the combined monthly import numbers of LA/LB to the TEU capacity of ships waiting in the queue at the end of each month, based on data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California. (Ship capacity is not the same as TEUs of actual cargo on board, but given that ships are sailing full, it’s a strong indicator of actual cargo trends.)
The data reveals that offshore capacity in the queue has continued to escalate, coming in just below LA/LB import volumes in November and then handily exceeding import volumes last month. Between the end of May and the end of December, the queue capacity jumped by almost 650,000 TEUs. (Queue capacity has remained relatively stable through January versus the end of December.)
Chart: American Shipper. LA/LB import data from ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach. Data on total TEU in the queue at the end of the month calculated by American Shipper based on data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California.
A different story
The press releases and media headlines on Los Angeles/Long Beach over the past week painted a different picture than the one shown by falling import and export data.
The recent public relations focus has been on the year-end total throughput number. That number reached an all-time high for 2021 as a result of gains back in the first half.
In its press release, the Port of Long Beach touted the “incredible milestone” of moving 9.38 million TEUs in 2021, up 15.7% from its previous record in 2020. Its December import decline was addressed fleetingly in the last paragraph of the release.
Los Angeles held its annual State of the Port event last Thursday. Executive Director Gene Seroka said at the event: “In 2021, we learned how much cargo we could move through our port under extraordinary circumstances. The Port of Los Angeles processed about 10.7 million TEUs. That’s about 13% more than in 2018, our previous record year.”
No data beyond the total throughput estimate was made available at the time of the State of the Port event. Asked about the import statistics, a Port of Los Angeles spokesperson told American Shipper that “data from one vessel is delaying the final tally.”
On the same day as Los Angeles’ State of the Port event, the White House released its latest update on the port situation. It too focused on the booming full-year results. It said: “2021 was a record year for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which moved more than 10 million import containers. This is a 14% increase over 2020 and a 13% increase over 2018, which held the previous record.”
The White House’s twice-monthly port reports have always cited LA/LB imports as a key performance indicator, but when quantifying changes, the White House has always featured year-to-date changes, which in practice hide more recent monthly setbacks behind earlier gains.
Combined import data from LA/LB confirm that last year’s record results were entirely driven by outperformance in the first half.
Chart: American Shipper based on data from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach
Unlike in prior months, the Port of Los Angeles did not issue a press release detailing its final December numbers, but instead quietly added them to its statistics page. Seven days passed between Los Angeles’ State of the Port address and the White House release and the eventual posting of final December statistics showing the deteriorating import and export numbers.
In the interim, the media reported: “Port of Los Angeles breaks cargo record in 2021” … “Record year for Port of Los Angeles” … “Ports move record amounts of cargo in 2021” … “Port of Los Angeles has busiest year on record as imports surge during COVID.” The headlines focused on the positive spin.
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Jan 31, 2022, 1:36:24 PM1/31/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade, space heaters is about all the poor can afford, that is if they are not living in a naftabidenville
under nafta billy clintons free trade, naftabideninflation is so high, prices are "ridiculous"
under nafta billy clintons free trade many low-wage workers are struggling with food insecurity and paying their bills.
under nafta billy clintons free trade "Not only can they not buy food, rents are soaring"
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The Day, New London, Conn.
Families adjust to rising costs of groceries, utilities and rent
Erica Moser, The Day, New London, Conn.
Sat, January 29, 2022, 7:33 PM
Jan. 29—Last winter, Angela Gaeta kept her thermostat around 65 degrees and found that the highest her gas and electric bill went was about $220. Now, she's keeping her thermostat "at a chilly 60 degrees" and has already seen her bill hit $250. She works as an IT manager from home, in the two-bedroom townhouse she shares with her teenaged daughter in Norwich.
"At my desk, I have a space heater that I use, and I bundle up. I've got the USB gloves that I plug in that are heated, and I've got my big blanket hoodie, and sometimes I'll be at my desk in a hat," Gaeta said, but she noted her daughter's room isn't that cold.
People here and across the country are making adjustments to deal with the rising costs of heat, groceries, gas, rent and more, whether that means adjusting food shopping habits, putting off major purchases or reaching out to a social services agency for help.
Norwich resident Michael Richardson said he's started buying more things at Walmart instead of Stop & Shop, buying household items in bulk, and not going out to eat as much. Richardson, who works in HVAC, lives with just his wife but said he feels for people with larger families.
"We just try to maintain our lifestyle, but give and take a little from each one, in order for us to live comfortably," he said.
Leaving NSA Supermarkets in New London on Wednesday, Veronica Guerri of Waterford said prices are "ridiculous," so she's stopped buying brand names and doesn't go out as much. She said she recently started going to this supermarket because it's cheaper.
Similarly, Tiffany Adanti, who lives in Oakdale and works in Groton, had been going to Stop & Shop and Big Y but has started going to ALDI. She has two kids, including a teenaged son, "so the snack bill is high." Adanti said with costs going up, she also switched cellphone carriers and car insurance.
Bill Cornelius of Niantic, who is semi-retired and lives with his wife, said he's noticed the price of cat food go up — and they have eight cats. Cornelius, who has a background in electrical contracting, also is concerned about the lack of housing being built for young families and the rising costs associated with new construction, such as lumber and copper wire.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, for all items rose 7% in December compared to the same month a year before, the largest 12-month increase since June 1982. Food at home went up by 6.3%, with meats, poultry, fish and eggs rising 12.5% — more than double any other grocery category.
Used cars and trucks were up 37.3%, and energy commodities were up by 48.9% — 41% for fuel oil and 49.5% for gasoline. Gasoline prices plummeted earlier in the coronavirus pandemic but prices last month were still higher than any December in the past decade.
Comparatively, wages and benefits increased 4% in 2021, the highest since 2001.
Consumer spending dropped 0.6% in December, after rising each of the previous three months.
Social service agencies see increased need
While some people are making lifestyle adjustments in response to rising prices, many low-wage workers already were struggling with food insecurity and paying their bills.
Regina Brady, director of the Women, Infants and Children program at Thames Valley Council for Community Action, said the rise in prices has impacted WIC clients, and most clients use multiple services within the agency.
"Not only can they not buy food," she said, but "Eversource went up an exorbitant amount as well, and they don't know where to go, so WIC is the 'door' they come in because they know they need something. I find that WIC staff are providing a lot more referrals to other resources both internally and externally."
She is seeing an influx of clients calling to get on WIC, which serves pregnant women, breastfeeding women up to the infant's first birthday, and children up to the child's fifth birthday. Through WIC, clients can get nutritious food that they may not be able to afford otherwise.
Brady noted that Eversource has a program where customers can get discounts if they receive certain benefits, and she's seen a "significant uptick" in calls and emails from clients looking to confirm their WIC eligibility so they can get their Eversource bill reduced.
TVCCA runs an energy assistance program, and agency Executive Director Deb Monahan said the price of oil in New London County through the program rose from $2.05 on Jan. 26 of last year to $3.14 on that day this year.
She noted when gas prices increase, "it's going to hit any commodity that has to be transported. It's going to hit food."
Late Wednesday afternoon, the line for the United Way of Southeastern Connecticut's mobile food pantry at C.B. Jennings International Elementary Magnet School stretched through the parking lot, all the way down Mercer Street and onto Hempstead Street.
"We're definitely seeing an increase in the amount of food, the need for food, particularly at our mobile food pantries," said Dina Sears-Graves, president and CEO of the United Way of Southeastern Connecticut. She said the United Way is intentional about including eggs and proteins and meats — groceries that have seen the largest price increases — so families get what they need.
But she said when there's inflation, donations go down because people aren't buying extra at the grocery store. United Way has to budget differently, and sourcing is still an issue amid empty shelves.
Kristen Chapman, who is social services coordinator and executive assistant to the mayor in Ledyard, said that donations to the Ledyard Food Pantry as well as visits from clients have remained steady. There was an overflowing donation bin Thursday at Town Hall.
"We have a very giving community here; we're very fortunate," she said.
The pantry recently started a relationship with Village Market to purchase meat and fresh produce, and those costs have gone up. The pantry also has agreements with Connecticut Foodshare and the Gemma E. Moran United Way/Labor Food Center, and Chapman said costs from both have stayed steady.
At the Jonnycake Center of Westerly, which operates a food pantry, social services program manager Maggie Pinto said the theme she's hearing from clients "is the cost of living is so high." She added that for people who have been living in a home for five years, it's hard to deal with a rent increase of $200 or $300 a month.
She recalled that one client said, "I think it's about making responsible choices about necessities. Having kids, their needs come before mine. Do they need new shoes, a new winter coat? Can I make what I have last through the winter...?" Another said they're going out to eat less often and spending less on coffee runs.
"We're seeing a higher rate of new clients coming in through our doors," Pinto said. She's hearing that clients are struggling to afford produce, meat and dairy, and they're getting creative due to lack of availability of other items, with supply chain issues.
But she said rising costs aren't putting too much of a strain on the budget of the Jonnycake Center, as it's getting funding through the Rhode Island Food Bank and Rhode Island Foundation.
Pinto thinks there's a stigma that food pantries or even SNAP resources provide lower quality food, "and that's just not the case."
"We really take pride in offering fresh vegetables, produce, meats, and getting that stuff in the hands of people who need it," she said.
The Jonnycake Center also offers financial assistance with rent, utilities and medical bills.
under nafta billy clintons free trade, naftabideninflation is so high, prices are "ridiculous"
under nafta billy clintons free trade many low-wage workers are struggling with food insecurity and paying their bills.
under nafta billy clintons free trade "Not only can they not buy food, rents are soaring"
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/families-adjust-rising-costs-groceries-013300068.html
The Day, New London, Conn.
Families adjust to rising costs of groceries, utilities and rent
Erica Moser, The Day, New London, Conn.
Sat, January 29, 2022, 7:33 PM
Jan. 29—Last winter, Angela Gaeta kept her thermostat around 65 degrees and found that the highest her gas and electric bill went was about $220. Now, she's keeping her thermostat "at a chilly 60 degrees" and has already seen her bill hit $250. She works as an IT manager from home, in the two-bedroom townhouse she shares with her teenaged daughter in Norwich.
"At my desk, I have a space heater that I use, and I bundle up. I've got the USB gloves that I plug in that are heated, and I've got my big blanket hoodie, and sometimes I'll be at my desk in a hat," Gaeta said, but she noted her daughter's room isn't that cold.
People here and across the country are making adjustments to deal with the rising costs of heat, groceries, gas, rent and more, whether that means adjusting food shopping habits, putting off major purchases or reaching out to a social services agency for help.
Norwich resident Michael Richardson said he's started buying more things at Walmart instead of Stop & Shop, buying household items in bulk, and not going out to eat as much. Richardson, who works in HVAC, lives with just his wife but said he feels for people with larger families.
"We just try to maintain our lifestyle, but give and take a little from each one, in order for us to live comfortably," he said.
Leaving NSA Supermarkets in New London on Wednesday, Veronica Guerri of Waterford said prices are "ridiculous," so she's stopped buying brand names and doesn't go out as much. She said she recently started going to this supermarket because it's cheaper.
Similarly, Tiffany Adanti, who lives in Oakdale and works in Groton, had been going to Stop & Shop and Big Y but has started going to ALDI. She has two kids, including a teenaged son, "so the snack bill is high." Adanti said with costs going up, she also switched cellphone carriers and car insurance.
Bill Cornelius of Niantic, who is semi-retired and lives with his wife, said he's noticed the price of cat food go up — and they have eight cats. Cornelius, who has a background in electrical contracting, also is concerned about the lack of housing being built for young families and the rising costs associated with new construction, such as lumber and copper wire.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, for all items rose 7% in December compared to the same month a year before, the largest 12-month increase since June 1982. Food at home went up by 6.3%, with meats, poultry, fish and eggs rising 12.5% — more than double any other grocery category.
Used cars and trucks were up 37.3%, and energy commodities were up by 48.9% — 41% for fuel oil and 49.5% for gasoline. Gasoline prices plummeted earlier in the coronavirus pandemic but prices last month were still higher than any December in the past decade.
Comparatively, wages and benefits increased 4% in 2021, the highest since 2001.
Consumer spending dropped 0.6% in December, after rising each of the previous three months.
Social service agencies see increased need
While some people are making lifestyle adjustments in response to rising prices, many low-wage workers already were struggling with food insecurity and paying their bills.
Regina Brady, director of the Women, Infants and Children program at Thames Valley Council for Community Action, said the rise in prices has impacted WIC clients, and most clients use multiple services within the agency.
"Not only can they not buy food," she said, but "Eversource went up an exorbitant amount as well, and they don't know where to go, so WIC is the 'door' they come in because they know they need something. I find that WIC staff are providing a lot more referrals to other resources both internally and externally."
She is seeing an influx of clients calling to get on WIC, which serves pregnant women, breastfeeding women up to the infant's first birthday, and children up to the child's fifth birthday. Through WIC, clients can get nutritious food that they may not be able to afford otherwise.
Brady noted that Eversource has a program where customers can get discounts if they receive certain benefits, and she's seen a "significant uptick" in calls and emails from clients looking to confirm their WIC eligibility so they can get their Eversource bill reduced.
TVCCA runs an energy assistance program, and agency Executive Director Deb Monahan said the price of oil in New London County through the program rose from $2.05 on Jan. 26 of last year to $3.14 on that day this year.
She noted when gas prices increase, "it's going to hit any commodity that has to be transported. It's going to hit food."
Late Wednesday afternoon, the line for the United Way of Southeastern Connecticut's mobile food pantry at C.B. Jennings International Elementary Magnet School stretched through the parking lot, all the way down Mercer Street and onto Hempstead Street.
"We're definitely seeing an increase in the amount of food, the need for food, particularly at our mobile food pantries," said Dina Sears-Graves, president and CEO of the United Way of Southeastern Connecticut. She said the United Way is intentional about including eggs and proteins and meats — groceries that have seen the largest price increases — so families get what they need.
But she said when there's inflation, donations go down because people aren't buying extra at the grocery store. United Way has to budget differently, and sourcing is still an issue amid empty shelves.
Kristen Chapman, who is social services coordinator and executive assistant to the mayor in Ledyard, said that donations to the Ledyard Food Pantry as well as visits from clients have remained steady. There was an overflowing donation bin Thursday at Town Hall.
"We have a very giving community here; we're very fortunate," she said.
The pantry recently started a relationship with Village Market to purchase meat and fresh produce, and those costs have gone up. The pantry also has agreements with Connecticut Foodshare and the Gemma E. Moran United Way/Labor Food Center, and Chapman said costs from both have stayed steady.
At the Jonnycake Center of Westerly, which operates a food pantry, social services program manager Maggie Pinto said the theme she's hearing from clients "is the cost of living is so high." She added that for people who have been living in a home for five years, it's hard to deal with a rent increase of $200 or $300 a month.
She recalled that one client said, "I think it's about making responsible choices about necessities. Having kids, their needs come before mine. Do they need new shoes, a new winter coat? Can I make what I have last through the winter...?" Another said they're going out to eat less often and spending less on coffee runs.
"We're seeing a higher rate of new clients coming in through our doors," Pinto said. She's hearing that clients are struggling to afford produce, meat and dairy, and they're getting creative due to lack of availability of other items, with supply chain issues.
But she said rising costs aren't putting too much of a strain on the budget of the Jonnycake Center, as it's getting funding through the Rhode Island Food Bank and Rhode Island Foundation.
Pinto thinks there's a stigma that food pantries or even SNAP resources provide lower quality food, "and that's just not the case."
"We really take pride in offering fresh vegetables, produce, meats, and getting that stuff in the hands of people who need it," she said.
The Jonnycake Center also offers financial assistance with rent, utilities and medical bills.
nickname unavailable
Jan 31, 2022, 7:57:35 PM1/31/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
under nafta billy clintons free trade "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
under nafta billy clintons free trade "The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable,"
under nafta billy clintons free trade "Prices are so high, inflation is astronomical, and the house my parents bought for $30,000 in the late '70s is worth over half a million today," he added. "How can [we] enter into that market without intergenerational wealth? It's impossible."
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
before some dim wit says whats this got to do with free trade, well DUH!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The real reason the nafta democrats would not extend the eviction moratorium, their chinese communist masters will have a feeding frenzy in the real estate market
nafta billy clintons chinese communist party accounts for 25% of the real estate investments in america, driving housing prices rent through the roofs
remember, smith, lincoln and keynes predicted that our money would come back to america in the form of massive price hikes and bubbles
are free traders unintentional pawns of the destruction of america, or willing participants?
https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/china-pwns-us-how-the-chinese-are-buying-up-america/
Silver Doctors
China “Pwns” Us: How the Chinese Are Buying Up America
October 21, 2020 11929
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
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Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
1 / 4
Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
Abha Bhattarai
Sun, January 30, 2022, 8:55 PM
Kiara Age moved in less than a year ago and now it's time to move again: Rent on her two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nevada, is rising 23% to nearly $1,600 a month, making it impossibly out of reach for the single mother.
Age makes $15 an hour working from home as a medical biller while also caring for her 1-year-old son, because she can't afford child care. By the time she pays rent - which takes up more than half of her salary - and buys groceries, there's little left over.
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
"I am trying to figure out what I can do," said Age, 32, who also has an 8-year-old daughter. "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
Rental prices across the country have been rising for months, but lately the increases have been sharper and more widespread, forcing millions of Americans to reassess their living situations.
Average rents rose 14% last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40%, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise - by about 10% this year - according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired.
"Rents really shot up in the second half of 2021," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. "The pandemic was kind of a pause on the economy and now that things are reopening, inflation is picking up, rents are going up and people are realizing they don't have as much disposable income as they might have thought they had."
Higher rent prices are also expected to be a key driver of inflation in coming months. Housing costs make up a third of the U.S. consumer price index, which is calculated based on the going rate of home rentals. But economists say there is a lag of 9 to 12 months before rising rents show up in inflation measures. As a result, even if inflation were to subside for all other components of the consumer price index, rising rents alone could keep inflation levels elevated through the year, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic.
While the Federal Reserve's likely interest rate increases are expected to slow soaring housing costs - already mortgage rates have been trending higher, which tends to cool the real estate market - the restraint on rental prices is expected to be much less direct and take longer to filter through.
In the meantime, the Biden administration has begun reallocating unused funds from its $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program to help residents with rent and utility payments in cities such as Washington, D.C., Houston and San Diego. President Joe Biden has also vowed to add nearly 100,000 affordable homes over the next three years by providing low-cost funding to qualifying developers, and encouraging states and local governments to reduce zoning and financing rules for affordable housing.
The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in many parts of life, and housing is no different. Homeowners benefited from rock-bottom interest rates and surging home prices, while renters have faced surging costs with little reprieve. And unlike markups in other categories - such as food or gas, where prices can waver in both directions - economists say annual leases and long-term mortgages make it unlikely that housing costs will come back down quickly once they rise.
Eleven million households, or 1 in 4 renters, spend more than half of their monthly income on rent, according to an analysis of 2018 census data by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, though experts say that figure is likely even higher now.
"The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable," said Dennis Shea, executive director of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "We have an inadequate supply of homes - for both rent and for sale - and of course the lowest income families are being hit hardest."
In interviews with renters around the country, many said their monthly payments had recently risen or were set to go up in the coming weeks. Multiple people said that despite local rent freezes, their management companies had found ways to increase monthly dues by tacking on new "amenity fees" or charging for services like trash collection that had previously been included.
Many said they began looking for other rental options, only to find that everything around them had gone up in price, too. Some said they're considering relocating altogether - from Austin to Richmond, or New York City to Dover, Del.
Aleksei Valentín and his husband, both doctoral students, recently downsized from a one-bedroom apartment in Frederick, Md., to a studio in a neighboring county in search of lower rents. Their previous building repeatedly hiked amenity fees during the pandemic, Valentín said, adding about $200 in extra charges to their monthly rent of $1,290. That apartment is now on the market for $1,600.
"First the fees started going up, and then we started getting notices that if we didn't put our trash out exactly like they liked, we'd have to start paying fines," said Valentín, 39. "The more people moved out, the more the amenity fees went up."
There were other problems too but the final straw, he said, came when the company removed the dumpster closest to his apartment. Valentín, who is in a wheelchair, said he had to travel a quarter-mile to dispose of his trash. Now he and his husband pay $1,400 a month and said they were deliberate about moving to a county with strong tenant rights laws.
Like many millennials, the 30-somethings say home-ownership feels increasingly out of reach. They have student loan debt and little in savings. Even buying a tiny house "feels like a pipe dream," Valentín said.
"Prices are so high, inflation is astronomical, and the house my parents bought for $30,000 in the late '70s is worth over half a million today," he added. "How can [we] enter into that market without intergenerational wealth? It's impossible."
The share of first-time home buyers has dropped to its lowest level in eight years, according to the National Association of Realtors. The group estimates that nearly 1 million renters were priced out of the housing market last year because of rising real estate prices and increased competition from wealthier, all-cash buyers.
Homes were in short supply even before the pandemic, particularly for low- and middle-income families. In 2020, the market added just 65,000 entry-level homes, those smaller than 1,400 square feet, compared with roughly 400,000 a year in the late 1970s, according to federally chartered mortgage investor Freddie Mac. As a result, more families are renting longer.
Desiree Tizon, a 29-year-old social media manager in Miami, was shocked to find that rent for her two-bedroom apartment on the waterfront is jumping 39% to nearly $3,700 a month in March. She's not sure whether she and her boyfriend will move or stay, but said the higher cost cuts into any hope of saving up for a down payment.
"I began looking around Miami, and it turns out all rent prices are up a ton," she said. "We're not finding anything reasonable or even comparable to our unit. Maybe we'll find a place that's $200 cheaper but is it worth the hassle of moving all of our things?"
She and her boyfriend, who works in tech, both got higher-paying jobs during the pandemic. They could technically afford the extra $1,000 a month, she said, though it doesn't feel right on principle.
"If we had enough money for a down payment, we could put that into a mortgage," she said. "But now with higher rent, we're stuck in this rat race for that much longer."
Early in the pandemic, Americans, especially those who could work from home, moved from cities to suburbs or bought second vacation homes in search of more space. Low interest rates and booming demand lifted housing prices to record highs. Apartments, meanwhile, were left to grapple with mounting vacancies and began offering perks like free parking, $500 gift cards, even Peloton bikes and TVs, in exchange for long-term leases.
But as the economy reopened and people headed back to cities, apartments began filling back up. Now, with home prices and mortgage rates both on the upswing, rentals are in high-demand again, giving landlords room to start asking for more money, said Fairweather of Redfin.
In Austin, Shadow LeMere is moving her belongings to storage and preparing to live in her car until she can find an affordable apartment. Rent on the two-bedroom she shares with her wife is set to rise 43%, from $1,500 a month to about $2,200, in early February.
She and her wife are planning to drive to Georgia to drop off their cat, Ziggy, with a friend. After that, they'll make their way up the East Coast in their Kia Soul until they find a cheaper place to settle down.
"We were pretty much existing on fumes before this," the 49-year-old said. "And now it's gotten so much worse."
LeMere, who used to work as an accountant, receives $900 a month in disability benefits. Her wife, Brandi Kalinowski, spent a decade as an auditor for a national grocery chain but quit last week in anticipation of the move.
The apartment building where they've lived for seven years typically raises rents by about 6% a year, LeMere said. But this year's massive jump has left many residents in dire situations. It's become common, she said, to see piles of people's belongings in the parking lot for nonpayment of rent.
"We can't afford to live here anymore," she said. "Not in Austin, not in Texas. We're going to nomad it for a bit and see where we end up."
under nafta billy clintons free trade "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
under nafta billy clintons free trade "The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable,"
under nafta billy clintons free trade "Prices are so high, inflation is astronomical, and the house my parents bought for $30,000 in the late '70s is worth over half a million today," he added. "How can [we] enter into that market without intergenerational wealth? It's impossible."
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The real reason the nafta democrats would not extend the eviction moratorium, their chinese communist masters will have a feeding frenzy in the real estate market
nafta billy clintons chinese communist party accounts for 25% of the real estate investments in america, driving housing prices rent through the roofs
remember, smith, lincoln and keynes predicted that our money would come back to america in the form of massive price hikes and bubbles
are free traders unintentional pawns of the destruction of america, or willing participants?
https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/china-pwns-us-how-the-chinese-are-buying-up-america/
Silver Doctors
China “Pwns” Us: How the Chinese Are Buying Up America
October 21, 2020 11929
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
...
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
Yahoo Home
Search query
Sign in
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Finance
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Washington Post
Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
1 / 4
Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
Abha Bhattarai
Sun, January 30, 2022, 8:55 PM
Kiara Age moved in less than a year ago and now it's time to move again: Rent on her two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nevada, is rising 23% to nearly $1,600 a month, making it impossibly out of reach for the single mother.
Age makes $15 an hour working from home as a medical biller while also caring for her 1-year-old son, because she can't afford child care. By the time she pays rent - which takes up more than half of her salary - and buys groceries, there's little left over.
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
"I am trying to figure out what I can do," said Age, 32, who also has an 8-year-old daughter. "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
Rental prices across the country have been rising for months, but lately the increases have been sharper and more widespread, forcing millions of Americans to reassess their living situations.
Average rents rose 14% last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40%, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise - by about 10% this year - according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired.
"Rents really shot up in the second half of 2021," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. "The pandemic was kind of a pause on the economy and now that things are reopening, inflation is picking up, rents are going up and people are realizing they don't have as much disposable income as they might have thought they had."
Higher rent prices are also expected to be a key driver of inflation in coming months. Housing costs make up a third of the U.S. consumer price index, which is calculated based on the going rate of home rentals. But economists say there is a lag of 9 to 12 months before rising rents show up in inflation measures. As a result, even if inflation were to subside for all other components of the consumer price index, rising rents alone could keep inflation levels elevated through the year, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic.
While the Federal Reserve's likely interest rate increases are expected to slow soaring housing costs - already mortgage rates have been trending higher, which tends to cool the real estate market - the restraint on rental prices is expected to be much less direct and take longer to filter through.
In the meantime, the Biden administration has begun reallocating unused funds from its $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program to help residents with rent and utility payments in cities such as Washington, D.C., Houston and San Diego. President Joe Biden has also vowed to add nearly 100,000 affordable homes over the next three years by providing low-cost funding to qualifying developers, and encouraging states and local governments to reduce zoning and financing rules for affordable housing.
The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in many parts of life, and housing is no different. Homeowners benefited from rock-bottom interest rates and surging home prices, while renters have faced surging costs with little reprieve. And unlike markups in other categories - such as food or gas, where prices can waver in both directions - economists say annual leases and long-term mortgages make it unlikely that housing costs will come back down quickly once they rise.
Eleven million households, or 1 in 4 renters, spend more than half of their monthly income on rent, according to an analysis of 2018 census data by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, though experts say that figure is likely even higher now.
"The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable," said Dennis Shea, executive director of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "We have an inadequate supply of homes - for both rent and for sale - and of course the lowest income families are being hit hardest."
In interviews with renters around the country, many said their monthly payments had recently risen or were set to go up in the coming weeks. Multiple people said that despite local rent freezes, their management companies had found ways to increase monthly dues by tacking on new "amenity fees" or charging for services like trash collection that had previously been included.
Many said they began looking for other rental options, only to find that everything around them had gone up in price, too. Some said they're considering relocating altogether - from Austin to Richmond, or New York City to Dover, Del.
Aleksei Valentín and his husband, both doctoral students, recently downsized from a one-bedroom apartment in Frederick, Md., to a studio in a neighboring county in search of lower rents. Their previous building repeatedly hiked amenity fees during the pandemic, Valentín said, adding about $200 in extra charges to their monthly rent of $1,290. That apartment is now on the market for $1,600.
"First the fees started going up, and then we started getting notices that if we didn't put our trash out exactly like they liked, we'd have to start paying fines," said Valentín, 39. "The more people moved out, the more the amenity fees went up."
There were other problems too but the final straw, he said, came when the company removed the dumpster closest to his apartment. Valentín, who is in a wheelchair, said he had to travel a quarter-mile to dispose of his trash. Now he and his husband pay $1,400 a month and said they were deliberate about moving to a county with strong tenant rights laws.
Like many millennials, the 30-somethings say home-ownership feels increasingly out of reach. They have student loan debt and little in savings. Even buying a tiny house "feels like a pipe dream," Valentín said.
"Prices are so high, inflation is astronomical, and the house my parents bought for $30,000 in the late '70s is worth over half a million today," he added. "How can [we] enter into that market without intergenerational wealth? It's impossible."
The share of first-time home buyers has dropped to its lowest level in eight years, according to the National Association of Realtors. The group estimates that nearly 1 million renters were priced out of the housing market last year because of rising real estate prices and increased competition from wealthier, all-cash buyers.
Homes were in short supply even before the pandemic, particularly for low- and middle-income families. In 2020, the market added just 65,000 entry-level homes, those smaller than 1,400 square feet, compared with roughly 400,000 a year in the late 1970s, according to federally chartered mortgage investor Freddie Mac. As a result, more families are renting longer.
Desiree Tizon, a 29-year-old social media manager in Miami, was shocked to find that rent for her two-bedroom apartment on the waterfront is jumping 39% to nearly $3,700 a month in March. She's not sure whether she and her boyfriend will move or stay, but said the higher cost cuts into any hope of saving up for a down payment.
"I began looking around Miami, and it turns out all rent prices are up a ton," she said. "We're not finding anything reasonable or even comparable to our unit. Maybe we'll find a place that's $200 cheaper but is it worth the hassle of moving all of our things?"
She and her boyfriend, who works in tech, both got higher-paying jobs during the pandemic. They could technically afford the extra $1,000 a month, she said, though it doesn't feel right on principle.
"If we had enough money for a down payment, we could put that into a mortgage," she said. "But now with higher rent, we're stuck in this rat race for that much longer."
Early in the pandemic, Americans, especially those who could work from home, moved from cities to suburbs or bought second vacation homes in search of more space. Low interest rates and booming demand lifted housing prices to record highs. Apartments, meanwhile, were left to grapple with mounting vacancies and began offering perks like free parking, $500 gift cards, even Peloton bikes and TVs, in exchange for long-term leases.
But as the economy reopened and people headed back to cities, apartments began filling back up. Now, with home prices and mortgage rates both on the upswing, rentals are in high-demand again, giving landlords room to start asking for more money, said Fairweather of Redfin.
In Austin, Shadow LeMere is moving her belongings to storage and preparing to live in her car until she can find an affordable apartment. Rent on the two-bedroom she shares with her wife is set to rise 43%, from $1,500 a month to about $2,200, in early February.
She and her wife are planning to drive to Georgia to drop off their cat, Ziggy, with a friend. After that, they'll make their way up the East Coast in their Kia Soul until they find a cheaper place to settle down.
"We were pretty much existing on fumes before this," the 49-year-old said. "And now it's gotten so much worse."
LeMere, who used to work as an accountant, receives $900 a month in disability benefits. Her wife, Brandi Kalinowski, spent a decade as an auditor for a national grocery chain but quit last week in anticipation of the move.
The apartment building where they've lived for seven years typically raises rents by about 6% a year, LeMere said. But this year's massive jump has left many residents in dire situations. It's become common, she said, to see piles of people's belongings in the parking lot for nonpayment of rent.
"We can't afford to live here anymore," she said. "Not in Austin, not in Texas. We're going to nomad it for a bit and see where we end up."
nickname unavailable
Feb 1, 2022, 1:49:56 PM2/1/22
to
nafta billy clintons victims of his disastrous policies have made california look like a 3rd world
the looting of nafta trains shows the real damage done to america by nafta billy clinton
"The images looked like a Third World country"
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/la-councilman-blasts-train-thefts-calls-them-a-threat-to-the-economy-125357980.html
Yahoo Finance
LA councilman blasts train theft 'chaos,' calls them 'a threat to our economy'
Dani Romero
Tue, February 1, 2022, 7:01 AM
Brazen freight train thefts have spiked in Los Angeles, with images of looted packages and abandoned containers capturing headlines and captivating social media — and putting pressure on California Governor Gavin Newsom to address conditions even he likened to "a third world country."
The thefts have sparked a war of words between law enforcement and Union Pacific (UNP), which owns the railroad and has called for stronger deterrence. But the growing problem has become a rallying cry for at least one local official, who is calling for stiffer penalties against criminals exploiting a weak link in the nation's supply chain crisis.
Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview that he's "never seen anything like this. We're seeing more chaos with fewer consequences for those who are committing these acts."
The issue has become more of a problem during the past three months – raising new criticism around L.A. County's no cash bail policy, which has worsened the problem by making it easier for thieves to get released — if they get charged at all.
In a letter to the LA County District Attorney last month, Adrian Guerrero, UP's director of public affairs, noted that rail thefts have skyrocketed by 160% in the county over the past year. On average, 90 containers were compromised every day, the company said.
“As a local elected official representing the port of Los Angeles, whenever there's a threat to divert cargo away from this region, it's a threat to our local economy,” Buscaino said.
'What the hell is going on?'
California Governor Gavin Newsom visits the site where multiple train looting has occurred along the freight train tracks in Los Angeles, California U.S., January 20, 2022 . REUTERS/David Swanson
California Governor Gavin Newsom visits the site where multiple train looting has occurred along the freight train tracks in Los Angeles, California U.S., January 20, 2022 . REUTERS/David Swanson
Amid a surge in smash and grab retail thefts plaguing California, the train crisis caught Newsom's attention, who in late January visited tracks strewn with garbage. The governor promised statewide coordination as law enforcement and prosecutors pursue petty thieves and organized criminals who have been raiding cargo containers.
"The images looked like a Third World country," Newsom told reporters. "What you saw here in the last week is just not acceptable. So, I took off the suit and tie and said I'm coming because I couldn't take it. I can't turn on the news anymore. What the hell is going on?"
The thefts have exposed a rift between UP and local law enforcement. In a letter released last month, L.A. County DA George Gascon shifted blame on the company for doing "little to secure or lock trains," while insisting the number of cases involving the rail company fell last year. Meanwhile, according to LAPD Deputy Chief Al Labrada, “UP has significantly decreased law enforcement staffing.”
Gascon, a progressive former San Francisco top prosecutor who was came into office in 2020, insisted that it was “very telling that other major railroad operations in the area are not facing the same level of theft at their facilities as UP."
Yet the company defended itself, saying it has "brought in dozens of special agents from across our 23-state network into the Los Angeles area, starting last year. But these agents cannot totally supplant the expertise and investigative skills of the LAPD, especially when it comes to organized theft of cargo," a spokesperson from UP told Yahoo Finance in an email.
Gascon's progressive policies, however, have him facing a recall effort that was officially approved by the Los Angeles County Registrar on Thursday. The effort was spurred by some of his orders that included the elimination of sentence enhancement charges, zero-bail policies and not prosecuting juveniles as adults for many crimes.
'This needs to stop'
Meanwhile, the cargo looting has taken on an added dimension of risk. While most of the stolen property are consumer goods, more than 80 newly manufactured guns were among the items stolen recently, local police officials said last week.
The pilfered firearms included at least 36 pistols and 46 semi-automatic shotguns that were taken from a burglarized container car in August and bound for Tennessee, LAPD said. Only two of those weapons have been recovered thus far, they said.
And last month, Yahoo Finance discovered that one stolen package was addressed to Oregon State Police from BPS Tactical Inc., a custom Law Enforcement gear company.
Buscaino told Yahoo Finance that the prosecutorial response needed to be more stringent. “It's about holding people accountable and whether it's installing heavy duty locks or when someone is caught by committing the theft, they need to be prosecuted."
Buscaino is seeking more transparency on package thefts from UP, while directing the Chief Legislative Analyst to report on thefts that include arrests made, whether the cases were referred for prosecution by the City Attorney’s Office, District Attorney’s Office or U.S. Attorney’s office.
Measures would also include bolstering police presence in the area, and preventative measures to deter thefts and trespassing.
Buscaino blasted "finger pointing" between the company and law enforcement officials, adding "I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the letters being sent to various departments and entities, let's get everyone at the table."
While Union Pacific agents have made hundreds of arrests, the company said the partnership with local and state law enforcement, and elected pubic officials is necessary.
The railroad company has been working with its clients to enhance security, testing drones and other high-tech tools. But "criminals [are] out there who are countering the drone deployment by knocking 'em down or shooting 'em down," Buscaino told Yahoo Finance.
"This needs to stop. This is an embarrassment to our city [and] our county," he added.
the looting of nafta trains shows the real damage done to america by nafta billy clinton
"The images looked like a Third World country"
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Yahoo Finance
LA councilman blasts train theft 'chaos,' calls them 'a threat to our economy'
Dani Romero
Tue, February 1, 2022, 7:01 AM
Brazen freight train thefts have spiked in Los Angeles, with images of looted packages and abandoned containers capturing headlines and captivating social media — and putting pressure on California Governor Gavin Newsom to address conditions even he likened to "a third world country."
The thefts have sparked a war of words between law enforcement and Union Pacific (UNP), which owns the railroad and has called for stronger deterrence. But the growing problem has become a rallying cry for at least one local official, who is calling for stiffer penalties against criminals exploiting a weak link in the nation's supply chain crisis.
Los Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino told Yahoo Finance in a recent interview that he's "never seen anything like this. We're seeing more chaos with fewer consequences for those who are committing these acts."
The issue has become more of a problem during the past three months – raising new criticism around L.A. County's no cash bail policy, which has worsened the problem by making it easier for thieves to get released — if they get charged at all.
In a letter to the LA County District Attorney last month, Adrian Guerrero, UP's director of public affairs, noted that rail thefts have skyrocketed by 160% in the county over the past year. On average, 90 containers were compromised every day, the company said.
“As a local elected official representing the port of Los Angeles, whenever there's a threat to divert cargo away from this region, it's a threat to our local economy,” Buscaino said.
'What the hell is going on?'
California Governor Gavin Newsom visits the site where multiple train looting has occurred along the freight train tracks in Los Angeles, California U.S., January 20, 2022 . REUTERS/David Swanson
California Governor Gavin Newsom visits the site where multiple train looting has occurred along the freight train tracks in Los Angeles, California U.S., January 20, 2022 . REUTERS/David Swanson
Amid a surge in smash and grab retail thefts plaguing California, the train crisis caught Newsom's attention, who in late January visited tracks strewn with garbage. The governor promised statewide coordination as law enforcement and prosecutors pursue petty thieves and organized criminals who have been raiding cargo containers.
"The images looked like a Third World country," Newsom told reporters. "What you saw here in the last week is just not acceptable. So, I took off the suit and tie and said I'm coming because I couldn't take it. I can't turn on the news anymore. What the hell is going on?"
The thefts have exposed a rift between UP and local law enforcement. In a letter released last month, L.A. County DA George Gascon shifted blame on the company for doing "little to secure or lock trains," while insisting the number of cases involving the rail company fell last year. Meanwhile, according to LAPD Deputy Chief Al Labrada, “UP has significantly decreased law enforcement staffing.”
Gascon, a progressive former San Francisco top prosecutor who was came into office in 2020, insisted that it was “very telling that other major railroad operations in the area are not facing the same level of theft at their facilities as UP."
Yet the company defended itself, saying it has "brought in dozens of special agents from across our 23-state network into the Los Angeles area, starting last year. But these agents cannot totally supplant the expertise and investigative skills of the LAPD, especially when it comes to organized theft of cargo," a spokesperson from UP told Yahoo Finance in an email.
Gascon's progressive policies, however, have him facing a recall effort that was officially approved by the Los Angeles County Registrar on Thursday. The effort was spurred by some of his orders that included the elimination of sentence enhancement charges, zero-bail policies and not prosecuting juveniles as adults for many crimes.
'This needs to stop'
Meanwhile, the cargo looting has taken on an added dimension of risk. While most of the stolen property are consumer goods, more than 80 newly manufactured guns were among the items stolen recently, local police officials said last week.
The pilfered firearms included at least 36 pistols and 46 semi-automatic shotguns that were taken from a burglarized container car in August and bound for Tennessee, LAPD said. Only two of those weapons have been recovered thus far, they said.
And last month, Yahoo Finance discovered that one stolen package was addressed to Oregon State Police from BPS Tactical Inc., a custom Law Enforcement gear company.
Buscaino told Yahoo Finance that the prosecutorial response needed to be more stringent. “It's about holding people accountable and whether it's installing heavy duty locks or when someone is caught by committing the theft, they need to be prosecuted."
Buscaino is seeking more transparency on package thefts from UP, while directing the Chief Legislative Analyst to report on thefts that include arrests made, whether the cases were referred for prosecution by the City Attorney’s Office, District Attorney’s Office or U.S. Attorney’s office.
Measures would also include bolstering police presence in the area, and preventative measures to deter thefts and trespassing.
Buscaino blasted "finger pointing" between the company and law enforcement officials, adding "I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the letters being sent to various departments and entities, let's get everyone at the table."
While Union Pacific agents have made hundreds of arrests, the company said the partnership with local and state law enforcement, and elected pubic officials is necessary.
The railroad company has been working with its clients to enhance security, testing drones and other high-tech tools. But "criminals [are] out there who are countering the drone deployment by knocking 'em down or shooting 'em down," Buscaino told Yahoo Finance.
"This needs to stop. This is an embarrassment to our city [and] our county," he added.
nickname unavailable
Feb 2, 2022, 7:20:32 PM2/2/22
to
nafta democrats are about to stick the poor with a double whammy, free trade and higher interest rates
remember when the fed tried to raise rates under trump, he threatened to fire the free traders at the fed
trump understands modern monetary theory, free trade is austerity
under nafta billy clintons free trade the poor are hurt in many ways: losing jobs and earnings, coping with less social protection, and having to borrow at higher interest rates.
----------------------------------
just in case some dim wit free traders says trump did no such thing, here it is,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-fed-idUSKCN1TR1SU
U.S. Markets
June 26, 20198:01 AMUpdated 3 years ago
Trump says he can fire Fed's Powell; it's not that simple
By Trevor Hunnicutt, Ann Saphir, Howard Schneider
"Trump’s renewed criticism of Powell for not lowering interest rates to help the United States compete against China, delivered in an interview on Fox Business Network, was the latest in a series of attacks that started only months after Trump made him Fed chief in early 2018."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/inflation-paranoia-threatens-recovery.html
Inflation Paranoia Threatens Recovery
Posted on February 2, 2022 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The Fed has committed itself to raising rates to tackle big bad inflation, despite the fact that this inflation is due to factors outside central bank control, like high energy prices, car production backlogs, poor harvests, and Covid-short-staffing-related supply chain issues. But common sense be damned! The omnipotent monetary authorities will burn the villages to save them.
By Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University and University of New South Wales (Australia), who held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s website
Inflation hawks are winning the day. The latest ‘beggar thyself’ race to raise interest rates has begun. This ostensibly responds to the spectre of runaway inflation, supposedly retarding economic growth and progress, and thus threatening central bank ‘credibility’.
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Inflation Fetish
The ‘one size fits all’ policy of raising interest rates to contain inflation is being touted again, the world over. This will surely kill national efforts to revive economies reeling from COVID-19 pandemic slowdowns.
Central banks in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) – such as Brazil, Russia and Mexico – began raising policy interest rates right after inflation warning bells were set off after mid-2021. Indonesia and South Africa have since joined the bandwagon.
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has warned that US interest rate rises would “throw cold water” on global recovery, especially hurting struggling emerging markets.
An earlier IMF blog had urged EMDEs to prepare for earlier than expected US interest rate hikes. The Fund has lowered its growth projections as the inflation bogey induces monetary and fiscal tightening.
Inflation Paranoia
Inflation hawks denounce price increases, claiming – without evidence – that it impedes growth. Former World Bank chief economist Michael Bruno and William Easterly refuted these popular, but false prejudices.
Using 1962-1992 data for 127 countries, they found, “The ratio of fervent beliefs to tangible evidence seems unusually high”. They also found extremely high inflation – over 40% yearly – mainly due to very exceptional circumstances, e.g., Nicaragua after the Sandinista takeover.
Bruno and Easterly concluded that inflation under 40% did not tend to accelerate or worsen. They concluded, “countries can manage to live with moderate – around 15–30 percent – inflation for long periods”.
Bank economists Ross Levine, Sara Zervos and David Renelt confirmed a negative inflation-growth relationship to be exceptional, and due to a few extreme cases.
Rudiger Dornbusch and former IMF Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer came to similar conclusions. They too found moderate inflation of 15–30% did not harm growth, emphasizing “such inflations can be reduced only at a substantial short-term cost to growth”.
Citing IMF research, Harry Johnson also argued that while very high inflation could be harmful, there was no conclusive empirical evidence of the alleged inflation-stagnation causal nexus.
Even monetarist guru Milton Friedman acknowledged, “Historically, all possible combinations have occurred: inflation with and without development, no inflation with and without development”.
Thus, the Fund and the Bank have no sound bases for promoting draconian policies to eliminate inflation above, say 5%, by citing a few exceptional cases of very high, runaway inflation and low growth.
Inflation Misdiagnosed
Friedman’s sweeping generalization that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” ignored other factors possibly contributing to inflation.
Without careful consideration of inflation’s causes, the same old policy prescriptions are likely to fail, but not without causing much harm. Prices tend to rise as demand outstrips supply. This can also happen when demand rises faster than supply, or if demand does not decline when supply falls.
The IMF attributes the current inflationary surge to supply chain woes, higher energy prices and local wage pressures. While demand has been boosted by pandemic relief and recovery measures, where existent, supply shortages remain vulnerable to disruptions.
Rising food costs are also pushing up consumer prices. Extreme weather events – droughts, fires, floods, etc. – have affected food output. More commodity price speculation – e.g., via indexed futures – has also raised food prices.
Although wages have risen in some sectors in some countries, economy-wide wage-price spirals are unlikely. Employment suffered during the pandemic while unionization is at historically low levels.
Labour’s collective bargaining powers have declined for decades, especially with technological change, casualization and globalization lowering the labour income share of GDP.
As the profit share of income continues to rise, rising mark-ups and executive remuneration also push up prices. With more market monopoly powers, price gouging has become more widespread with the pandemic.
Understanding what causes particular prices to rise is critical for planning appropriate policy responses. Although devoid of actual diagnoses, inflation hawks have no hesitation prescribing their standard inflation elixir – raising interest rates.
Raising interest rates may help if inflation is mainly due to easier credit fuelling demand. But tighter credit is unlikely to effectively address ‘supply-side’ inflation, which typically requires targeted measures to overcome bottlenecks.
Interest Rates Harm
Higher interest rates increase borrowing costs, squeezing investment and household spending. This hits businesses, hurting employment, incomes and spending, and can result in a vicious downward spiral.
Higher interest rates also increase governments’ debt burdens, forcing them to cut spending on public services including healthcare and education. Incredibly, elevated interest rates – harming investments, jobs, earnings and social protection – supposedly benefits the public!
The adverse spill-over impacts of rising interest rates are also considerable. Raising rates in major advanced economies weaken EMDE capital inflows, currencies, fiscal positions and financial stability, especially as sovereign debt has ballooned over the last two years.
Indeed, the interest rate is a blunt weapon against inflation. How can raising interest rates curb food or oil price increases? While supply blockages persist, essential consumer prices will rise, even with high interest rates.
Higher interest rates may even aggravate inflation as businesses cut investment spending. Thus, supply bottlenecks, especially of essential goods, are likely to be more severe, pushing up their prices.
Most people are indebted, with the poor often borrowing to smoothen consumption. Thus, the poor are hurt in many ways: losing jobs and earnings, coping with less social protection, and having to borrow at higher interest rates.
Hence, the standard medicine of higher interest rates has massive social costs. Meanwhile, the principal beneficiaries of using higher interest rates to lower inflation are rich net creditors and financial asset owners.
Toxic Prescription
Premature reversal of expansionary fiscal policy has been largely due to debt hawks’ successful fear mongering. Thus, debt paranoia nipped in the bud the ‘green shoots’ of robust recovery following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
In the early 1980s, inflation paranoia led to interest rate spikes, triggering debt crises, stagnation and lost decades in much of the world, especially developing countries. Now, inflation hawks are poised to derail global recovery, stop adequate climate action and otherwise undermine sustainable development.
Policymakers the world over, but especially in developing countries, must reject the inflation hawks’ paranoid screeches. Instead, they must identify and address the sources, causes and nature of the inflation actually faced. And then, take appropriate measures to prevent inflation accelerating to harmful levels.
There are a host of alternative policy measures available to policymakers. They must reject the lie that they have no choice but to raise interest rates – widely recognized as a blunt weapon, with deadly ‘externalities’.
While all available policy options may involve trade-offs, policymakers must seek and achieve socially optimal results. This requires robust, resilient, green and inclusive recoveries – not fighting quixotic windmills of the paranoid mind.
remember when the fed tried to raise rates under trump, he threatened to fire the free traders at the fed
trump understands modern monetary theory, free trade is austerity
under nafta billy clintons free trade the poor are hurt in many ways: losing jobs and earnings, coping with less social protection, and having to borrow at higher interest rates.
----------------------------------
just in case some dim wit free traders says trump did no such thing, here it is,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-fed-idUSKCN1TR1SU
U.S. Markets
June 26, 20198:01 AMUpdated 3 years ago
Trump says he can fire Fed's Powell; it's not that simple
By Trevor Hunnicutt, Ann Saphir, Howard Schneider
"Trump’s renewed criticism of Powell for not lowering interest rates to help the United States compete against China, delivered in an interview on Fox Business Network, was the latest in a series of attacks that started only months after Trump made him Fed chief in early 2018."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Inflation Paranoia Threatens Recovery
Posted on February 2, 2022 by Yves Smith
Yves here. The Fed has committed itself to raising rates to tackle big bad inflation, despite the fact that this inflation is due to factors outside central bank control, like high energy prices, car production backlogs, poor harvests, and Covid-short-staffing-related supply chain issues. But common sense be damned! The omnipotent monetary authorities will burn the villages to save them.
By Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University and University of New South Wales (Australia), who held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s website
Inflation hawks are winning the day. The latest ‘beggar thyself’ race to raise interest rates has begun. This ostensibly responds to the spectre of runaway inflation, supposedly retarding economic growth and progress, and thus threatening central bank ‘credibility’.
Sponsored Content
by: mini cboe vix futures
Mini Cboe VIX Futures
Inflation Fetish
The ‘one size fits all’ policy of raising interest rates to contain inflation is being touted again, the world over. This will surely kill national efforts to revive economies reeling from COVID-19 pandemic slowdowns.
Central banks in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) – such as Brazil, Russia and Mexico – began raising policy interest rates right after inflation warning bells were set off after mid-2021. Indonesia and South Africa have since joined the bandwagon.
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has warned that US interest rate rises would “throw cold water” on global recovery, especially hurting struggling emerging markets.
An earlier IMF blog had urged EMDEs to prepare for earlier than expected US interest rate hikes. The Fund has lowered its growth projections as the inflation bogey induces monetary and fiscal tightening.
Inflation Paranoia
Inflation hawks denounce price increases, claiming – without evidence – that it impedes growth. Former World Bank chief economist Michael Bruno and William Easterly refuted these popular, but false prejudices.
Using 1962-1992 data for 127 countries, they found, “The ratio of fervent beliefs to tangible evidence seems unusually high”. They also found extremely high inflation – over 40% yearly – mainly due to very exceptional circumstances, e.g., Nicaragua after the Sandinista takeover.
Bruno and Easterly concluded that inflation under 40% did not tend to accelerate or worsen. They concluded, “countries can manage to live with moderate – around 15–30 percent – inflation for long periods”.
Bank economists Ross Levine, Sara Zervos and David Renelt confirmed a negative inflation-growth relationship to be exceptional, and due to a few extreme cases.
Rudiger Dornbusch and former IMF Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer came to similar conclusions. They too found moderate inflation of 15–30% did not harm growth, emphasizing “such inflations can be reduced only at a substantial short-term cost to growth”.
Citing IMF research, Harry Johnson also argued that while very high inflation could be harmful, there was no conclusive empirical evidence of the alleged inflation-stagnation causal nexus.
Even monetarist guru Milton Friedman acknowledged, “Historically, all possible combinations have occurred: inflation with and without development, no inflation with and without development”.
Thus, the Fund and the Bank have no sound bases for promoting draconian policies to eliminate inflation above, say 5%, by citing a few exceptional cases of very high, runaway inflation and low growth.
Inflation Misdiagnosed
Friedman’s sweeping generalization that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” ignored other factors possibly contributing to inflation.
Without careful consideration of inflation’s causes, the same old policy prescriptions are likely to fail, but not without causing much harm. Prices tend to rise as demand outstrips supply. This can also happen when demand rises faster than supply, or if demand does not decline when supply falls.
The IMF attributes the current inflationary surge to supply chain woes, higher energy prices and local wage pressures. While demand has been boosted by pandemic relief and recovery measures, where existent, supply shortages remain vulnerable to disruptions.
Rising food costs are also pushing up consumer prices. Extreme weather events – droughts, fires, floods, etc. – have affected food output. More commodity price speculation – e.g., via indexed futures – has also raised food prices.
Although wages have risen in some sectors in some countries, economy-wide wage-price spirals are unlikely. Employment suffered during the pandemic while unionization is at historically low levels.
Labour’s collective bargaining powers have declined for decades, especially with technological change, casualization and globalization lowering the labour income share of GDP.
As the profit share of income continues to rise, rising mark-ups and executive remuneration also push up prices. With more market monopoly powers, price gouging has become more widespread with the pandemic.
Understanding what causes particular prices to rise is critical for planning appropriate policy responses. Although devoid of actual diagnoses, inflation hawks have no hesitation prescribing their standard inflation elixir – raising interest rates.
Raising interest rates may help if inflation is mainly due to easier credit fuelling demand. But tighter credit is unlikely to effectively address ‘supply-side’ inflation, which typically requires targeted measures to overcome bottlenecks.
Interest Rates Harm
Higher interest rates increase borrowing costs, squeezing investment and household spending. This hits businesses, hurting employment, incomes and spending, and can result in a vicious downward spiral.
Higher interest rates also increase governments’ debt burdens, forcing them to cut spending on public services including healthcare and education. Incredibly, elevated interest rates – harming investments, jobs, earnings and social protection – supposedly benefits the public!
The adverse spill-over impacts of rising interest rates are also considerable. Raising rates in major advanced economies weaken EMDE capital inflows, currencies, fiscal positions and financial stability, especially as sovereign debt has ballooned over the last two years.
Indeed, the interest rate is a blunt weapon against inflation. How can raising interest rates curb food or oil price increases? While supply blockages persist, essential consumer prices will rise, even with high interest rates.
Higher interest rates may even aggravate inflation as businesses cut investment spending. Thus, supply bottlenecks, especially of essential goods, are likely to be more severe, pushing up their prices.
Most people are indebted, with the poor often borrowing to smoothen consumption. Thus, the poor are hurt in many ways: losing jobs and earnings, coping with less social protection, and having to borrow at higher interest rates.
Hence, the standard medicine of higher interest rates has massive social costs. Meanwhile, the principal beneficiaries of using higher interest rates to lower inflation are rich net creditors and financial asset owners.
Toxic Prescription
Premature reversal of expansionary fiscal policy has been largely due to debt hawks’ successful fear mongering. Thus, debt paranoia nipped in the bud the ‘green shoots’ of robust recovery following the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
In the early 1980s, inflation paranoia led to interest rate spikes, triggering debt crises, stagnation and lost decades in much of the world, especially developing countries. Now, inflation hawks are poised to derail global recovery, stop adequate climate action and otherwise undermine sustainable development.
Policymakers the world over, but especially in developing countries, must reject the inflation hawks’ paranoid screeches. Instead, they must identify and address the sources, causes and nature of the inflation actually faced. And then, take appropriate measures to prevent inflation accelerating to harmful levels.
There are a host of alternative policy measures available to policymakers. They must reject the lie that they have no choice but to raise interest rates – widely recognized as a blunt weapon, with deadly ‘externalities’.
While all available policy options may involve trade-offs, policymakers must seek and achieve socially optimal results. This requires robust, resilient, green and inclusive recoveries – not fighting quixotic windmills of the paranoid mind.
nickname unavailable
Feb 3, 2022, 10:12:12 PM2/3/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade, a barrel of oil hit $91.00 today. high prices from free trade collapsed the u.s. economy in 2008
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from free trade
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
nickname unavailable
Feb 10, 2022, 9:40:39 AM2/10/22
to
anyone who claims to be a humanitarian ignore free tradeflation!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/consumer-price-index-cpi-inflation-january-2022-210344769.html
...
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/consumer-price-index-cpi-inflation-january-2022-210344769.html
...
nickname unavailable
Feb 12, 2022, 12:50:13 PM2/12/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade: Consumers on rising inflation: 'I feel scared; I get angry'
“I feel scared, I get angry, I get sad. How do the seniors and people with children survive this?” she asked
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/consumer-on-rising-inflation-i-feel-scared-i-get-angry-193258783.html
...
“I feel scared, I get angry, I get sad. How do the seniors and people with children survive this?” she asked
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
...
nickname unavailable
Feb 12, 2022, 12:59:26 PM2/12/22
to
the fraud humanitarian free trader does not dare show his face:
WHAT ABOUT THE POOR FREE TRADER! Inflation Has Americans Shelling Out Another $276 a Month
inflation at 7.5% on a year-ago basis, compared with the 2.1% average growth in 2018 and 201
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
Emma Kinery
Thu, February 10, 2022, 1:21 PM
(Bloomberg) -- The typical U.S. household is spending an additional $276 a month on goods and services because of rising inflation, according to Moody’s Analytics Inc.
“Having inflation at 7.5% on a year-ago basis, compared with the 2.1% average growth in 2018 and 2019, is costing the average household $276 per month,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s. The cost of inflation differs across income and demographic cohorts, he said.
Annual Price Increases in Select Categories
Food -- 7% in January, most since 1981
Fuel oil -- 46.5%
Gasoline -- 40%
Electricity -- 10.7%
Piped natural gas -- 23.9%
Household furnishings, supplies -- record 9.3%
New vehicles -- 12.2%, most since 1975
Toys -- 2%, most since 1997
Rent of shelter -- 4.4%, most since 2007
Recreation services -- record 5%
WHAT ABOUT THE POOR FREE TRADER! Inflation Has Americans Shelling Out Another $276 a Month
inflation at 7.5% on a year-ago basis, compared with the 2.1% average growth in 2018 and 201
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/inflation-americans-shelling-another-276-192131807.html
Emma Kinery
Thu, February 10, 2022, 1:21 PM
(Bloomberg) -- The typical U.S. household is spending an additional $276 a month on goods and services because of rising inflation, according to Moody’s Analytics Inc.
“Having inflation at 7.5% on a year-ago basis, compared with the 2.1% average growth in 2018 and 2019, is costing the average household $276 per month,” said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody’s. The cost of inflation differs across income and demographic cohorts, he said.
Annual Price Increases in Select Categories
Food -- 7% in January, most since 1981
Fuel oil -- 46.5%
Gasoline -- 40%
Electricity -- 10.7%
Piped natural gas -- 23.9%
Household furnishings, supplies -- record 9.3%
New vehicles -- 12.2%, most since 1975
Toys -- 2%, most since 1997
Rent of shelter -- 4.4%, most since 2007
Recreation services -- record 5%
nickname unavailable
Feb 13, 2022, 2:26:49 PM2/13/22
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under nafta billy clintons free trade shoplifting has reach epic proportions, remember many of those shoplifters are hungry, desperate, and many used to make the things that they are shoplifting
Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions, Shoplifting has gotten so bad nationally that chains like Rite Aid are closing hard-hit stores, sending terrified employees home in Ubers and locking up aisles of seemingly mundane items like deodorant and toothpaste
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.axios.com/shoplifting-retail-crisis-online-resale-9031ced5-04c9-4e88-84f8-1c93e39e7afd.html
Updated Feb 11, 2022 - Economy & Business
Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions
Jennifer A. Kingson
Jennifer A. Kingson
Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions, Shoplifting has gotten so bad nationally that chains like Rite Aid are closing hard-hit stores, sending terrified employees home in Ubers and locking up aisles of seemingly mundane items like deodorant and toothpaste
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Updated Feb 11, 2022 - Economy & Business
Shoplifting reaches crisis proportions
Jennifer A. Kingson
Jennifer A. Kingson
nickname unavailable
Feb 14, 2022, 10:09:00 AM2/14/22
to
remember 2008 was the results of the blowout of free trade that drove prices through the roof.
$5.00 a gallon of gas, it looks like its coming again under nafta billy clintons free trade
$100 Oil Threatens to Compound World Economy’s Inflation Shock
PRESIDENT TRUMP had fossil fuels on the ropes: Just 2 years ago, oil prices plunged briefly below zero.
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/100-oil-threatens-compound-world-211750831.html
$100 Oil Threatens to Compound World Economy’s Inflation Shock
Enda Curran and Rich Miller
Sun, February 13, 2022, 3:17 PM
...
$5.00 a gallon of gas, it looks like its coming again under nafta billy clintons free trade
$100 Oil Threatens to Compound World Economy’s Inflation Shock
PRESIDENT TRUMP had fossil fuels on the ropes: Just 2 years ago, oil prices plunged briefly below zero.
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
$100 Oil Threatens to Compound World Economy’s Inflation Shock
Enda Curran and Rich Miller
Sun, February 13, 2022, 3:17 PM
...
nickname unavailable
Feb 14, 2022, 10:27:20 AM2/14/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade the poor are in 'Survival mode': Inflation falls hardest on low-income Americans
and why are there so many poor, FREE TRADE IS A LACK OF"TARIFFS", "TARIFFS" ARE A TAX ON THE RICH, "TARIFFS" ALSO BLUNT INFLATION, CREATE EMPLOYMENT AND RAISE WAGES
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/survival-mode-inflation-falls-hardest-031257508.html
'Survival mode': Inflation falls hardest on low-income Americans
Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam, (c) 2022, The Washington Post
Sun, February 13, 2022, 9:12 PM
"While inflation is rising everywhere, price hikes are particularly devastating to lower-income households with already tight budgets. Nearly all their expenses go to necessities - food, energy, housing - which have seen some of the largest increases at different points over the past year."
and why are there so many poor, FREE TRADE IS A LACK OF"TARIFFS", "TARIFFS" ARE A TAX ON THE RICH, "TARIFFS" ALSO BLUNT INFLATION, CREATE EMPLOYMENT AND RAISE WAGES
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
'Survival mode': Inflation falls hardest on low-income Americans
Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam, (c) 2022, The Washington Post
Sun, February 13, 2022, 9:12 PM
"While inflation is rising everywhere, price hikes are particularly devastating to lower-income households with already tight budgets. Nearly all their expenses go to necessities - food, energy, housing - which have seen some of the largest increases at different points over the past year."
nickname unavailable
Feb 14, 2022, 8:46:30 PM2/14/22
to
nafta billy clintons free trade inflation hits food banks at time of need
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/inflation-hits-food-banks-time-050100533.html
Mackenzi Klemann, The Lima News, Ohio
Sat, February 12, 2022, 11:01 PM
Feb. 13—LIMA — Food banks are purchasing less food because of inflation, despite seeing increased need after the expiration of the child tax credit and rising costs for food, gas and shelter.
Persistent supply shortages, shipping delays and higher prices are making it difficult for food banks to keep their shelves stocked, mirroring the trend in grocery stores. But the problem comes at a particularly difficult time for families, as inflation soared to an annual rate of 7.5% in January...
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Mackenzi Klemann, The Lima News, Ohio
Sat, February 12, 2022, 11:01 PM
Feb. 13—LIMA — Food banks are purchasing less food because of inflation, despite seeing increased need after the expiration of the child tax credit and rising costs for food, gas and shelter.
Persistent supply shortages, shipping delays and higher prices are making it difficult for food banks to keep their shelves stocked, mirroring the trend in grocery stores. But the problem comes at a particularly difficult time for families, as inflation soared to an annual rate of 7.5% in January...
nickname unavailable
Feb 15, 2022, 1:05:17 PM2/15/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade January wholesale inflation surged 9.7% from a year ago
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-producer-prices-surge-9-133750888.html
PAUL WISEMAN
Tue, February 15, 2022, 7:37 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) — Wholesale inflation in the United States surged again last month, rising 9.7% from a year earlier in a sign that price pressures remain high at all levels of the economy...
"Perhaps one of the most interesting, if not frustrating parts of the rise of Trump is the inability to get Democrats to accept the idea that the economic policies of Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama set the stage for a man like Trump. I think that among the Clinton Liberals, the madness has reached the stage the Tea Party reached with its “Birther” conspiracies around Obama."
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
PAUL WISEMAN
Tue, February 15, 2022, 7:37 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) — Wholesale inflation in the United States surged again last month, rising 9.7% from a year earlier in a sign that price pressures remain high at all levels of the economy...
"Perhaps one of the most interesting, if not frustrating parts of the rise of Trump is the inability to get Democrats to accept the idea that the economic policies of Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama set the stage for a man like Trump. I think that among the Clinton Liberals, the madness has reached the stage the Tea Party reached with its “Birther” conspiracies around Obama."
nickname unavailable
Feb 15, 2022, 1:17:03 PM2/15/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade Inflation is making some seniors choose between food and medications
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/m/1dba727f-b13d-3218-af33-ac3e33c963f8/inflation-is-making-some.html
MarketWatch
Inflation is making some seniors choose between food and medications — what you can do
Inflation is making some seniors choose between food and medications — what you can do
Paul Brandus
Tue, February 15, 2022, 9:21 AM
“To go hungry or get my medications is a choice I have had to make this year,” writes “R.M.” from South Carolina, a Social Security recipient who is being hammered by soaring food and drug prices. “R.M.” — who was responding to a survey by the Senior Citizens League (SCL), a nonprofit advocacy group — is hardly alone. With inflation running at its highest levels since the Reagan era—40 years ago—seniors are having to make difficult, and dangerous, choices each day, as the price for both of these essentials jumps...
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
MarketWatch
Inflation is making some seniors choose between food and medications — what you can do
Inflation is making some seniors choose between food and medications — what you can do
Paul Brandus
Tue, February 15, 2022, 9:21 AM
“To go hungry or get my medications is a choice I have had to make this year,” writes “R.M.” from South Carolina, a Social Security recipient who is being hammered by soaring food and drug prices. “R.M.” — who was responding to a survey by the Senior Citizens League (SCL), a nonprofit advocacy group — is hardly alone. With inflation running at its highest levels since the Reagan era—40 years ago—seniors are having to make difficult, and dangerous, choices each day, as the price for both of these essentials jumps...
nickname unavailable
Feb 15, 2022, 9:50:30 PM2/15/22
to
folks you think nafta billy clintons free trade inflation is bad now, just wait: Fertilizer Just Got Even More Expensive as Potash Prices Jump
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/fertilizer-just-got-even-more-211034070.html
Fertilizer Just Got Even More Expensive as Potash Prices Jump
Jen Skerritt and Elizabeth Elkin
Tue, February 15, 2022, 3:10 PM
It all points to rising costs for farmers, who are already curbing their fertilizer use, which could lead to lower crop yields and further boost food inflation. Nutrien Ltd. has increased potash prices across North America by $25, Green Markets said Tuesday...
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Fertilizer Just Got Even More Expensive as Potash Prices Jump
Jen Skerritt and Elizabeth Elkin
Tue, February 15, 2022, 3:10 PM
It all points to rising costs for farmers, who are already curbing their fertilizer use, which could lead to lower crop yields and further boost food inflation. Nutrien Ltd. has increased potash prices across North America by $25, Green Markets said Tuesday...
nickname unavailable
Feb 15, 2022, 10:02:03 PM2/15/22
to
folks, inflation from nafta billy clintons free trade is out of control!
Cost of Growing Food to Rise Even More Amid Weedkiller Supply Crunch(free trade)
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/cost-growing-food-rise-even-200612995.html
Cost of Growing Food to Rise Even More Amid Weedkiller Supply Crunch
Elizabeth Elkin and Tarso Veloso Ribeiro
Tue, February 15, 2022, 3:17 PM
(Bloomberg) -- A supply crunch is threatening to cause a spike in prices for the world’s No. 1 weedkiller, making it even more expensive for farmers to grow food...
Cost of Growing Food to Rise Even More Amid Weedkiller Supply Crunch(free trade)
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Cost of Growing Food to Rise Even More Amid Weedkiller Supply Crunch
Elizabeth Elkin and Tarso Veloso Ribeiro
Tue, February 15, 2022, 3:17 PM
(Bloomberg) -- A supply crunch is threatening to cause a spike in prices for the world’s No. 1 weedkiller, making it even more expensive for farmers to grow food...
nickname unavailable
Feb 17, 2022, 11:22:42 PM2/17/22
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under nafta billy clintons free trade largest increase in import prices in 11 years adds to intense U.S. inflation
import prices actually went down under trumps "TARIFFS"
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/m/87fccdd6-bc5d-3a01-9735-1157b878bbc4/import-prices-jump-2-as.html
Import prices jump 2% as biggest increase in 11 years adds to intense U.S. inflation
Jeffry Bartash
Wed, February 16, 2022, 10:36 AM
...
import prices actually went down under trumps "TARIFFS"
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Import prices jump 2% as biggest increase in 11 years adds to intense U.S. inflation
Jeffry Bartash
Wed, February 16, 2022, 10:36 AM
...
nickname unavailable
Feb 17, 2022, 11:24:44 PM2/17/22
to
nickname unavailable
Feb 18, 2022, 2:23:56 PM2/18/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade, food prices are soaring
Food prices drove much of the inflation rise in January
And there's no relief is in sight for consumers struggling with sky-high food expenses
Part of the problem beyond the cost of raw materials is the packaging materials; 80% is made in mainland China
import prices actually went down under trumps "TARIFFS"
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/food-prices-are-high-and-going-higher-strategist-says-214241618.html
Ihsaan Fanusie
Ihsaan Fanusie
Mon, February 14, 2022, 3:42 PM
Food prices drove much of the inflation rise in January, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And there's no relief is in sight for consumers struggling with sky-high food expenses, says one strategist.
“Part of the problem beyond the cost of raw materials is the packaging materials; 80% is made in mainland China, ” Strategic Resource Group Managing Director Burt Flickinger said in a recent Yahoo Finance Live segment. “And that applies to salt and snacks, cookies and crackers, all the way to sports beverages. So prices [are] high and going higher.”
Food prices drove much of the inflation rise in January
And there's no relief is in sight for consumers struggling with sky-high food expenses
Part of the problem beyond the cost of raw materials is the packaging materials; 80% is made in mainland China
import prices actually went down under trumps "TARIFFS"
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Ihsaan Fanusie
Ihsaan Fanusie
Mon, February 14, 2022, 3:42 PM
Food prices drove much of the inflation rise in January, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And there's no relief is in sight for consumers struggling with sky-high food expenses, says one strategist.
“Part of the problem beyond the cost of raw materials is the packaging materials; 80% is made in mainland China, ” Strategic Resource Group Managing Director Burt Flickinger said in a recent Yahoo Finance Live segment. “And that applies to salt and snacks, cookies and crackers, all the way to sports beverages. So prices [are] high and going higher.”
nickname unavailable
Feb 18, 2022, 9:39:24 PM2/18/22
to
because of nafta billy clintons free trade You’re already paying more for groceries and gas. Here’s where consumers will feel the next round of ‘sticker shock.’
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/m/dc1ff60a-46ac-3e4f-a27f-48bcc57fa1c8/you%E2%80%99re-already-paying-more.html
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
nickname unavailable
Feb 22, 2022, 7:06:40 PM2/22/22
to
GUARANTEED CRICKETS!!! under nafta billy clintons free trade, only the wages of the wealthy exceeded inflation
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/did-wages-keep-inflation-2021-192111903.html
Fox Business
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Fox Business
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
nickname unavailable
Feb 24, 2022, 12:18:12 PM2/24/22
to
Financial crisis looming for working class as inflation(driven by free trade)hits record high
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-financial-crisis-looming-working-132826231.html
Opinion: Financial crisis looming for working class as inflation hits record high
Mike Gibbons
Thu, February 24, 2022, 7:28 AM
...
“Perhaps one of the most interesting, if not frustrating parts of the rise of Trump is the inability to get Democrats to accept the idea that the economic policies of Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama set the stage for a man like Trump. I think that among the Clinton Liberals, the madness has reached the stage the Tea Party reached with its “Birther” conspiracies around Obama.”
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Opinion: Financial crisis looming for working class as inflation hits record high
Mike Gibbons
Thu, February 24, 2022, 7:28 AM
...
“Perhaps one of the most interesting, if not frustrating parts of the rise of Trump is the inability to get Democrats to accept the idea that the economic policies of Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama set the stage for a man like Trump. I think that among the Clinton Liberals, the madness has reached the stage the Tea Party reached with its “Birther” conspiracies around Obama.”
nickname unavailable
Feb 25, 2022, 10:04:47 AM2/25/22
to
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/inflation-remained-high-january-depressing-140816294.html
Axios
Inflation remained high in January, depressing incomes
"This measure, real disposable personal income, has been in negative territory every month since August. That helps explain the seeming conundrum of a strong job market and poor public opinion polling on the economy."...
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Axios
Inflation remained high in January, depressing incomes
"This measure, real disposable personal income, has been in negative territory every month since August. That helps explain the seeming conundrum of a strong job market and poor public opinion polling on the economy."...
nickname unavailable
Mar 2, 2022, 4:57:06 PM3/2/22
to
oil $111.00 plus change today, went to the store, some prices are doubling.
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://finance.yahoo.com/
------
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
------
nickname unavailable
Mar 7, 2022, 11:44:14 PM3/7/22
to
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/most-u-workers-took-inflation-133300689.html
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Most U.S. Workers Took an Inflation Pay Cut in 2021
Luca Powell, The Record-Eagle, Traverse City, Mich.
Sun, March 6, 2022, 7:33 AM
...
nickname unavailable
Mar 10, 2022, 1:05:33 PM3/10/22
to
free trade inflation sets another record! CPI rose 7.9% in February, wiping away last months record
Most American workers have taken a pay cut in the past 2 years, even if they didn't know it.
free trade drives up inflation, and workers take a pay cut
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/consumer-price-index-cpi-inflation-february-2022-203614415.html
"The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 7.9% in February compared to last year, marking the fastest annual jump since 1982. This took out January's previous 40-year high rate of 7.5%, and matched consensus economist expectations, according to Bloomberg data."
Most American workers have taken a pay cut in the past 2 years, even if they didn't know it.
free trade drives up inflation, and workers take a pay cut
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
"The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 7.9% in February compared to last year, marking the fastest annual jump since 1982. This took out January's previous 40-year high rate of 7.5%, and matched consensus economist expectations, according to Bloomberg data."
M Kfivethousand
Mar 12, 2022, 11:37:18 PM3/12/22
to
On Thursday, January 27, 2022 at 10:15:57 AM UTC-6, nickname unavailable wrote:
> its fun outing free trade frauds:) The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
>
> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson.html
>
>
> The Saker Interviews Michael Hudson
> Posted on January 27, 2022 by Yves Smith
>
> Yves here. Michel Hudson, in this short talk with The Saker, debunks many widespread misperceptions about the dollar, the US economy, and the prospects for fundamental change.
>
> I have only a couple of teeny quibbles and a further thought. Hudson discusses private equity buying up single family homes.
Unserious questions:
My buyer's other house was $850,000
And now I know way more about him then I wanted to know, including his debts and salary. [sticks fingers in ears, LA LA LA I can’t hear you!!!]
mk5000
He's so stiff even music couldn't make him go
Your batteries are running low
And I ain't stayin', no, no, no
We're alone tonight and you've done let me go--Suzi Quatro - Sticks and Stones
> its fun outing free trade frauds:) The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
>
> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson.html
>
>
> The Saker Interviews Michael Hudson
> Posted on January 27, 2022 by Yves Smith
>
> Yves here. Michel Hudson, in this short talk with The Saker, debunks many widespread misperceptions about the dollar, the US economy, and the prospects for fundamental change.
>
> I have only a couple of teeny quibbles and a further thought. Hudson discusses private equity buying up single family homes.
Unserious questions:
My buyer's other house was $850,000
And now I know way more about him then I wanted to know, including his debts and salary. [sticks fingers in ears, LA LA LA I can’t hear you!!!]
mk5000
He's so stiff even music couldn't make him go
Your batteries are running low
And I ain't stayin', no, no, no
We're alone tonight and you've done let me go--Suzi Quatro - Sticks and Stones
M Kfivethousand
Mar 12, 2022, 11:42:35 PM3/12/22
to
On Monday, January 31, 2022 at 6:57:35 PM UTC-6, nickname unavailable wrote:
> under nafta billy clintons free trade Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
>
> under nafta billy clintons free trade "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
>
> under nafta billy clintons free trade "The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable,"
>
> under nafta billy clintons free trade "Prices are so high, inflation is astronomical, and the house my parents bought for $30,000 in the late '70s is worth over half a million today," he added. "How can [we] enter into that market without intergenerational wealth? It's impossible."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The real reason the nafta democrats would not extend the eviction moratorium, their chinese communist masters will have a feeding frenzy in the real estate market
>
> nafta billy clintons chinese communist party accounts for 25% of the real estate investments in america, driving housing prices rent through the roofs
>
> remember, smith, lincoln and keynes predicted that our money would come back to america in the form of massive price hikes and bubbles
>
> are free traders unintentional pawns of the destruction of america, or willing participants?
>
> https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/china-pwns-us-how-the-chinese-are-buying-up-america/
>
> Silver Doctors
>
> China “Pwns” Us: How the Chinese Are Buying Up America
> October 21, 2020 11929
>
> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
> ...
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
>
>
> Yahoo Home
> Search query
> Sign in
> 3
>
> Mail
>
> Mail
> News
> Finance
> Sports
> Entertainment
> Life
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> Shopping
> Tech Tips
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> More...
>
> Washington Post
> Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
> 1 / 4
> Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
> Abha Bhattarai
> Sun, January 30, 2022, 8:55 PM
>
> Kiara Age moved in less than a year ago and now it's time to move again: Rent on her two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nevada, is rising 23% to nearly $1,600 a month, making it impossibly out of reach for the single mother.
>
> Age makes $15 an hour working from home as a medical biller while also caring for her 1-year-old son, because she can't afford child care. By the time she pays rent - which takes up more than half of her salary - and buys groceries, there's little left over.
>
> Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
>
> "I am trying to figure out what I can do," said Age, 32, who also has an 8-year-old daughter. "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
>
> Rental prices across the country have been rising for months, but lately the increases have been sharper and more widespread, forcing millions of Americans to reassess their living situations.
>
> Average rents rose 14% last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40%, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise - by about 10% this year - according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired.
>
> "Rents really shot up in the second half of 2021," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. "The pandemic was kind of a pause on the economy and now that things are reopening, inflation is picking up, rents are going up and people are realizing they don't have as much disposable income as they might have thought they had."
>
> Higher rent prices are also expected to be a key driver of inflation in coming months. Housing costs make up a third of the U.S. consumer price index, which is calculated based on the going rate of home rentals. But economists say there is a lag of 9 to 12 months before rising rents show up in inflation measures. As a result, even if inflation were to subside for all other components of the consumer price index, rising rents alone could keep inflation levels elevated through the year, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic.
>
> While the Federal Reserve's likely interest rate increases are expected to slow soaring housing costs - already mortgage rates have been trending higher, which tends to cool the real estate market - the restraint on rental prices is expected to be much less direct and take longer to filter through.
>
> In the meantime, the Biden administration has begun reallocating unused funds from its $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program to help residents with rent and utility payments in cities such as Washington, D.C., Houston and San Diego. President Joe Biden has also vowed to add nearly 100,000 affordable homes over the next three years by providing low-cost funding to qualifying developers, and encouraging states and local governments to reduce zoning and financing rules for affordable housing.
Selling a house is hard work
Yeah I totally read the letter from the buyer, he said he “hoped” for closing Thursday July23, but would we at least consider Friday July24
July24 was the day I was gonna have the house blast cleaned, so need a sooner appointment than that now
So we need to have it cleaned, be done and out by Wednesday July 22 now, so I can look walk through it after cleaning on Thursday July 23
Closing on Friday July 24
mk5000
To be different somehow, would escape me
Cause all these obstacles make it difficult
When you're just trying to change me
At least when we stand together
I'm not the only soul trapped in limbo==ISSUES
"Personality Cult"
> under nafta billy clintons free trade Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
>
> under nafta billy clintons free trade "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
>
> under nafta billy clintons free trade "The fact is, for too many Americans, housing is unaffordable,"
>
> under nafta billy clintons free trade "Prices are so high, inflation is astronomical, and the house my parents bought for $30,000 in the late '70s is worth over half a million today," he added. "How can [we] enter into that market without intergenerational wealth? It's impossible."
> under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
>
>
> The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
> before some dim wit says whats this got to do with free trade, well DUH!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> The real reason the nafta democrats would not extend the eviction moratorium, their chinese communist masters will have a feeding frenzy in the real estate market
>
> nafta billy clintons chinese communist party accounts for 25% of the real estate investments in america, driving housing prices rent through the roofs
>
> remember, smith, lincoln and keynes predicted that our money would come back to america in the form of massive price hikes and bubbles
>
> are free traders unintentional pawns of the destruction of america, or willing participants?
>
> https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/china-pwns-us-how-the-chinese-are-buying-up-america/
>
> Silver Doctors
>
> China “Pwns” Us: How the Chinese Are Buying Up America
> October 21, 2020 11929
>
> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
> ...
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/rents-40-cities-forcing-millions-025531936.html
>
>
> Yahoo Home
> Search query
> Sign in
> 3
>
>
> News
> Finance
> Sports
> Entertainment
> Life
> COVID-19
> Shopping
> Tech Tips
> Yahoo Plus
> More...
>
> Washington Post
> Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
> 1 / 4
> Rents are up 40% in some cities, forcing millions to find another place to live
> Abha Bhattarai
> Sun, January 30, 2022, 8:55 PM
>
> Kiara Age moved in less than a year ago and now it's time to move again: Rent on her two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nevada, is rising 23% to nearly $1,600 a month, making it impossibly out of reach for the single mother.
>
> Age makes $15 an hour working from home as a medical biller while also caring for her 1-year-old son, because she can't afford child care. By the time she pays rent - which takes up more than half of her salary - and buys groceries, there's little left over.
>
> Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
>
> "I am trying to figure out what I can do," said Age, 32, who also has an 8-year-old daughter. "Rent is so high that I can't afford anything."
>
> Rental prices across the country have been rising for months, but lately the increases have been sharper and more widespread, forcing millions of Americans to reassess their living situations.
>
> Average rents rose 14% last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40%, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise - by about 10% this year - according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired.
>
> "Rents really shot up in the second half of 2021," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. "The pandemic was kind of a pause on the economy and now that things are reopening, inflation is picking up, rents are going up and people are realizing they don't have as much disposable income as they might have thought they had."
>
> Higher rent prices are also expected to be a key driver of inflation in coming months. Housing costs make up a third of the U.S. consumer price index, which is calculated based on the going rate of home rentals. But economists say there is a lag of 9 to 12 months before rising rents show up in inflation measures. As a result, even if inflation were to subside for all other components of the consumer price index, rising rents alone could keep inflation levels elevated through the year, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic.
>
> While the Federal Reserve's likely interest rate increases are expected to slow soaring housing costs - already mortgage rates have been trending higher, which tends to cool the real estate market - the restraint on rental prices is expected to be much less direct and take longer to filter through.
>
> In the meantime, the Biden administration has begun reallocating unused funds from its $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program to help residents with rent and utility payments in cities such as Washington, D.C., Houston and San Diego. President Joe Biden has also vowed to add nearly 100,000 affordable homes over the next three years by providing low-cost funding to qualifying developers, and encouraging states and local governments to reduce zoning and financing rules for affordable housing.
Selling a house is hard work
Yeah I totally read the letter from the buyer, he said he “hoped” for closing Thursday July23, but would we at least consider Friday July24
July24 was the day I was gonna have the house blast cleaned, so need a sooner appointment than that now
So we need to have it cleaned, be done and out by Wednesday July 22 now, so I can look walk through it after cleaning on Thursday July 23
Closing on Friday July 24
mk5000
To be different somehow, would escape me
Cause all these obstacles make it difficult
When you're just trying to change me
At least when we stand together
I'm not the only soul trapped in limbo==ISSUES
"Personality Cult"
nickname unavailable
Mar 13, 2022, 9:30:23 PM3/13/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade, Real Wages Decline 12 Times in the Last 14 Months
The average worker has lost money to inflation 12 times in the last 14 months
free trade drives up inflation, and workers take a pay cut
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
For all workers, real (inflation-adjusted) wages declined nearly 0.8 percent in February.
For all workers, real wages declined for the 12th time in 14 months.
For production and nonsupervisory workers, real wages declined nearly 0.6 percent in February.
For production and nonsupervisory workers, real wages declined for the 10th time in the last 14 months.
The average worker has lost money to inflation 12 times in the last 14 months
free trade drives up inflation, and workers take a pay cut
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://mishtalk.com/economics/real-wages-decline-12-times-in-the-last-14-months
For all workers, real (inflation-adjusted) wages declined nearly 0.8 percent in February.
For all workers, real wages declined for the 12th time in 14 months.
For production and nonsupervisory workers, real wages declined nearly 0.6 percent in February.
For production and nonsupervisory workers, real wages declined for the 10th time in the last 14 months.
nickname unavailable
Mar 15, 2022, 7:48:36 PM3/15/22
to
under nafta billy clintons free trade, Real Wages Decline 12 Times in the Last 14 Months
The average worker has lost money to inflation 12 times in the last 14 months
free trade drives up inflation, and workers take a pay cut
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-producer-prices-climbed-10-123654790.html
The average worker has lost money to inflation 12 times in the last 14 months
free trade drives up inflation, and workers take a pay cut
just stunning! under nafta billy clintons free trade disposable income has declined every month since last august
the free trade inflation is a tax on Americans and is taking place under complete(nafta)Democrat leadership
Did wages keep up with inflation in 2021? Only for the wealthy, analysis shows
folks, BIDENFLATION WILL SWELL THE RANKS IN THE BIDENVILLES!
under trumps protectionism, wages exceeded inflation for over 3 years
under trumps "TARIFFS" import prices actually went down
The U.S. consumer price inflation reflects its dependence on other countries. Import prices are up, and cannot go down, but wages are going down:)
"TARIFFS" protect the poor from the brutality of free trade
Associated Press
US producer prices climbed 10% in February from a year ago
FILE - In this Tuesday, June 15, 2021 file photograph, beef is displayed in the meat department at Lambert's Rainbow Market, in Westwood, Mass. Wholesale inflation in the United States surged again last month, rising 9.7% from a year earlier in a sign that price pressures remain high at all levels of the economy. The Labor Department said Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022, that its producer price index — which measures inflation before it reaches consumers — jumped 1% from December. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
PAUL WISEMAN
Tue, March 15, 2022, 7:36 AM
Wholesale inflation in the United States shot up 10% last month from a year earlier — another sign that inflationary pressures remain intense at all levels of the economy.
The Labor Department said Tuesday that its producer price index — which tracks inflation before it hits consumers — rose 0.8% from January. The increases were in line with economists' forecasts.
Wholesale energy prices were up 33.8% over the past year and food prices 13.7%...
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