Do you think I'm advocating for inflation as an institution?

History is history. Maybe you think AI is going to herald in some era of non-inflation and free people from the control of the ultra rich.

It's pretty apparent to me that AI isn't going to do that. It's going to do very very very very very much the opposite.

I agree that disruption of trade leads to wars. Usually of very large scale but we haven't had one of those since the advent of nuclear weapons.

And people keep misinterpreting my comment that I believe Donald Trump has good policy. I absolutely don't. That's why I said the tariffs are insane. Theoretically what Donald Trump wants to do is bring manufacturing back to his white voters in the former middle class, and bring the US into an isolationist stance.

Biden did not put troops on the ground in Ukraine. I believe bush II would have enthusiastically. Biden did not roll back the tarriffs Trump imposed in his first term either.

So generally the overall political trend in the United States is to be like this.

Ask the rest of your comment. You could ignore history if you want and hope for something different. But.... Well you should know the quote about history, and I don't want to have to repeat it:-)

I didn't say it would be effective. My point is that it is thematically aligned. I agree that it is counterproductive assuming that was what his goal is.

Our military budget remains a comically bad allocation of funds. If we're going to be isolationist and we are, we should cut our number of carrier groups in half and throw all of that money into subsidies.

I like a lot of wood Zion says especially since it provokes thought. He is a hot take internet guy.

Do I really think China is going to disappear over demographics? I think if you would gone back to the 1980s he would have looked at the Japanese demographics and said the same thing.

Japan is still around and it's doing fine.

Are we going to see privateers and one eyed captains pirating international trade like he once predicted? Not in the age of carriers.

But what navies can do is they can harass ships: board them, inspect them, delay them. Arbitrarily close shopping lanes and force them to take other routes (China could do this to make their exports preferable to say Vietnams).

Zeihan parrots a lot of other geopolitical thought and international relations thought. The general question post cold war was when the US will go isolationist. I believe largely that did not happen because US industrials wanted offshore production for cheap labor. So the US maintained its global focus.

With China, and Xi in particular, doing the things that they are doing to him in capitalism in China, that is forcing a reevaluation of companies have their production.

Sure. You could move it to Vietnam or Malaysia or Thailand or various countries like that, but that still places them within the Chinese military sphere.

When you consider that we have a country like Mexico south of our border which is extremely productive, more productive than practically any other country. We currently have our production outsourced to any degree, why not move our production to Mexico?

Most of our natural resources, especially with the discovery of shale oil in The Dakotas is sourceable from the northern hemisphere.

But we'll see what happens

> of all the fudgeable numbers in economics, consumer inflation is the one they should try to be the most honest about.

A lot of government liabilities are tied to CPI, so there's a strong incentive on the part of the government to under-report inflation.

He is just lying. His edit shows that he isn’t actually focused on both sides but is trying to muddy the waters to blame specifically democrats.

He couldn’t even keep the mask on for two statements

"We have no political system at all, we have a sort of corporate party with two wings, both financed by the national security state..." -Gore Vidal

All the other stuff, all the heady discourses, all the piety about the downtrodden, be then the minorities from one side, or the poor rural white man from the other, it is just a fucking smoking mirror, just tools to have loyal soldiers to their cause.

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That's exactly why gold is a useful proxy. The price of gold is pretty much purely a function of how much money speculators have in their pockets. If inflation is high, it means there are more dollars that can go into gold speculation, driving up the nominal cost of gold. If the cost of gold is going down, it means the dollar is strong by comparison.

If you used a proxy that had a significant utility in its own right, like say oil or steel, the price would be a function of how efficiently it can be produced and how strong the economy at large is to demand its consumption.

> Similar to fiat, most of the value in gold is in people believing it has value.

Much moreso, really, because the value of money is kinda sticky; it's really difficult for it to change _quickly_ because a lot of stuff is essentially priced months or years in advance. Even the pretty dramatic inflation in developed world countries in '21-'23 would not be particularly exciting price action for gold, which really can swing quite dramatically in a short period of time.

This misses the point that you can establish the purchasing power of gold very easily vs a basket of common groceries or consumer goods.

vanity (jewelry, a luxury product)

Jewelry traditionally functioned as a rough store of value because it's easy to sell quickly (albeit at a steep discount), and it makes a remarkably reliable Veblen good, as a glance at the Oval Office will demonstrate.

Lagging by 10-20 years like between 1980 - 2002 when it declined even in nominal terms despite consumer prices more than doubling?

If you bought in 1980 you would have had to wait until 2024 to break even when adjusted by CPI…

> prices double every 7 years, which is obviously not what we observe.

It’s not? The first two things that came to mind to check are almost exactly doubled:

Case-Schiller for Seattle metro area for example is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEXRNSA/

Price of eggs is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

It may not be what you observe, but frankly, prices doubling at a 7-year rate sounds a lot like what's actually happening.

You'd just open the interview with that - go straight to salary neg

What happens when no-one wants to hire them in fear of retributions from the Trump government?

Oh, sure, tax the rich! Specifically, I would start with break up the untaxable trusts and corporate holdings exemptions, and cancel the real estate “unrented properties” tax rebate so that they’re forced to lease at market rates or otherwise sell dormant property holdings. But that’s not going to have any effect on inflation, so I’m not going to discuss that further it in this inflation-focused post.

If you tax corporations directly, they’ll just raise prices to pass the tax on to workers — but if you don’t tax corporate profits properly, they’ll just raise prices to consume all worker income and suffocate the dual competitors of entrepreneurs and of quality of life gains by households — so you have to tax corporations in a way that charges them extra revenue tax when their profits go up faster than their wages, neutralized only by paying workers more and maintain or lower prices. That’s what this proposes: either they help the Fed meet inflation targets by raising wages rather than prices, or they see their profits reduced in a way that can’t be charged to workers — as doing so would raise prices and thus inflation, which would further amplify their tax against their profits, resulting in a death spiral for their corporation between shrinking demand and growing overhead. (And, in times of deflation, the opposite: they are compelled by threat of reduces profits to raise prices rather than wages, just as they do today exclusively, until inflation stabilizes at the Fed target of whatever percent.)

This all works because, in the U.S., the uncontrolled component of inflation is the growth in profits minus the growth in wages. You can’t specify a wage floor or companies will just lay people off or raise prices, and you can’t impose a simple tax on corporate profits or companies will just lay people off or raise prices. The only way to prevent that is to tax (growth in profits – growth in wages – inflation target), which in an excess-inflation climate such as today — combined with the classic U.S. revenue-scaled tax rate schedules — would cost corporations who don’t invest excessive profit growth back into their workforce more than the simple cost of the wage increases would have.

(The R&D exemption that Amazon abuses would, as previously discussed, need to be restricted to less than 100% of research costs; use the same profit tiering schedules as above so that R&D for a billion-dollar gross-profit before-deductions company is capped at one half of the annual inflation rate — once you’re making that much, you don’t need the exemption to grow.)

(Offshore labor would need to be estimated at the federal minimum wage rate adjusted for currency strength/weakness to the country hosting that labor, unless explicitly documented otherwise through worker counts and wages, which would significantly worsen the value of offshoring: offshoring-to-cheap-labor companies would be at a significant disadvantage for growth taxation versus those that simply paid the costs of domestic investment, training, and wages.)

Which of course there is a clear outside reason for it.

Of course...dang it!

I'm less concerned with Trump voters (more or less the same people keep voting for him), and more with why ~10 million people didn't vote for his opponent (who had voted for her predecessor).

I don't believe it had anything to do with the price of eggs, either. That was presented as the primary reason, and it's so clearly wrong that it makes me suspicious.

If eggs were about inflation, why did the price drop back down?

They are voting for chaos, because the establishment in the Republican and Democratic parties simply do not care about the everyday people.

As an environmentalist, I essentially have no party, and so while I hate Donald Trump, I understand exactly why he was voted into office.

20 years ago (ie mid 2000s) was a unique time of extremely high gas prices with 2008 being the all time high both adjusted for inflation and absolute. Adjusted for inflation, oil is currently higher than any point between 1990 and 2004, and in absolute terms since 2022 its been higher than any point outside of the 2006-2014 period.

That's a pretty neat idea. Do the price aggregation sites (eg. camelcamecamel) do anything like that?

> The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth.

People usually aren't objective though even when looking around at their own lives. When evaluating inflation in groceries they'll point to a few things that have had some pretty massive spikes (beef, eggs, soda) and ignore a lot of the other things in their shopping cart that hasn't had anywhere near as much inflation (grains, pastas, lunchmeats, pork, lots of vegetables, potatoes, lots of fresh fruit, etc).

It can be pretty difficult for most people to actually be objective when looking at the world. Tons of people let emotions dominate what they see.

I'm not arguing the BLS price index numbers are entirely perfect measures of reality, but the number of times I've had people tell me things like eating out is 10x more expensive than it was a few years ago is quite high. Is that an objective reality?

Yes, economic metrics can be reductive. E.g. believing GDP is a measure of well being is a common reductive mistake. However, the public are often wildly incorrect. I should have been more precise and said that in order to have a productive analysis and make good policy you need objective metrics and context with discussion.

Let's see if this fits.

>The public in general can be really bad at perceiving the truth. I might take note of people's feelings to go and recheck something but I would not trust peoples feelings with stuff like this to make any sort of conclusion.

Good advice for non-inflationary times as well.

But either way sometimes I'm only interested in what effect it has on the general public more than anything else.

I have no metrics other than real-time experience against what has been published over the last 55 years and how it correlates anecdotally, so please don't take what I say as serious fortune-telling, when it's nothing but ancient history ;)

Five years ago even seems like it's gone and almost forgotten.

This week at Walmart, where they have better data if not better economists than thou, they rolled back some sensitive stuff I've been watching for about 10 years or more. First of all there had been great hesitation for over a year to raise anything more than they had in earlier years (it was already up a lot), but you could tell there was internal pressure building as other retailers could hesitate no more. They've got to be able to have a decent markup in the face of constantly rising costs, or why even bother. So earlier this year the cumulative price increases over 5 years finally reached a full 50%. I can only imagine there are some Walmart leaders who never wanted it to happen just because they are patriotic Americans and it's not right, others who hesitated as much as they could because of "optics". That's a fairly sobering line to cross when prices had remained absolutely stable for many years since launch, as designed. But 50 full percent it did reach, and that was the stuff they were trying to hold back most on.

Not like the 300% or more gradual increase over 10 years on many non-bargain items more often sharing eye-level shelf space. These are not a growing category because Walmart is moving upscale, no it's because so many people having upscale habits can't afford upscale prices any more, when not too long ago they could easily.

That 50% increase over 5 years on selected bargain program items? Just rolled back to when it equaled only a 33% increase, real quick this week. This is back in line with the prices before the latest rise. Probably hoping it works since people still seemed to be buying OK at those prices before, not much differently than last year, or they wouldn't have dared raise them in 2025 at all.

No rollbacks on the +300% items at this time though.

I don't want to consider tariff-sensitive items either, or those competitive with Amazon, that would be a whole different equation. But this particular "Walmart Rollback" is not like the rest, and I've seen them all since they built their first non-rural store to begin with in my city decades ago.

This time it's not the kind of over-competitive tactic they were famous for using, when they were building bigger stores than ever and "monopolized" that terminology for marketing. Now it's a quiet rollback in response to fewer shoppers, spending less on bargain items where there is no remaining competition. After holding off on price rises for so long, nominally catching up with inflation was not nearly intended to determine the point at which consumers couldn't take it any more, but you've got to face it when things stop flying off the shelf. If you weren't paying attention they don't want everybody to remember that the prices were that much higher a few weeks ago, it was embarrassing. Yes, they needed the money, but it's not going to do any good if there's not enough people able to purchase.

Also this week, a local pawn shop temporarily not loaning money or purchasing almost any items except for gold, because "people just aren't buying or redeeming other merchandise any more".

Just so happens that 10% per year over 5 years adds up to about 50%. Walmart wouldn't have jacked prices that high if it wasn't undeniably needed finally based on all the data they have.

I've noticed this for a while, I remember what it felt like when Nixon was getting ready for his recession, and he was absolutely as non-crooked as he could get. And I well remember how it felt when it reached a conservatively government-reported 10% per year. At the beginning I was actually in what they call "fintech" today, first modem in town, woo hoo. People now look back on it like it was a relatively difficult blip in time, but I assure you it was a slow-motion dumpster fire that outlasted Reagan.

Sooner or later, people can't afford anything any more anyway, consumers crater and interest rates skyrocket along with inflation since there's no carrot remaining and it's going to take a big stick to beat whatever's left out of a dead horse. Then off to the glue factory for the spent carcasses after that. Economic statistics can only apply to the cash flow that continues to occur, resulting in 100% survivor bias. Only those who have extremely good fortune and are relatively unscathed can judge when the devastation "ends", and "recovery" begins. That's the only financial signal that you've got, consumers would never notice on their own since no recovery ever has a realistic enough "upturn" for prices to actually come down or the lost purchasing power of the dollar to recover. At all.

When prices come down like they did at Walmart this week, anybody think that's a sign of recovery? After rising uncontrollably more so earlier this year than last, in order to catch up with the ongoing inflation that they previously hoped was slowing? When an increasing rate is so undeniable now that some non-positive indications eventually escape from BLS when it's already long structured to prevent downturns in sentiment? Which has really turned out to work when it papered over minor financial downturns, and when a little one snuck through they called it a "great" recession when it was a non-event by comparison to the real thing, and people believed it. Meanwhile it's no co-incidence that BLS looks to be slated for extreme cuts to transparency from here.

It's a familiar sign that financial malfeasance of Nixonian proportions is already underway. Lickety-split.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) the world is not nearly as nefarious or conspiratorial as people with shorter sticks tend to make it out to be.

It makes our macro forecasting a bit less dimensional...

:(…:)…:(

Picturing a future political cartoon of hobo-looking guys sitting around a winter fire burning in an old oil drum — one guy is holding up a newspaper (wut?) and saying to the rest, "Hey guys, it's fine because it says here that the employment numbers reported are the best ever!"

wanna bet? i will take a bet that inflation will not return to normal (ie. sub 2.1) in the next report

Apparently, they've decided to go with "just not report the numbers."

(Source: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trumps-bls-pick-could-p...).

The majority of R voters don't care about authoritative sources. In fact, authority when it comes to information is a negative in their view, based on all available evidence (ie elections over the past few decades). We're well past the point that debates matter.

Yes, it *would be* nice to have well-informed voters and intelligent and well-argued discussions.

But we'll never live in a place like that. We're stuck in the Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp world.

Democracy is a circus managed by the monkey cage.

And to build new factories you need things like steele, etc. Lots of which now have... high tariffs on them.

The policy is not intended to bring back manufacturing, or it would be tuned to enable/encourage the inputs needed for bringing back manufacturing.

But tariffs sure have encourage a lot of people to meet with the president and make 'special' deals with him to get themselves/their interests exemptions.

Everything everywhere since late 2015 or so.

So nothing to do with interest rates Jerome Powell or any decisions at the fed? Nothing to do with any other spending?

Trump has been president for fewer than 9 months.

>Tariffs did not make the price of your BLT go up, it’s greed.

What do you want to do about it, Stalin? Use the power of the state to legislate away human greed? Imprison these greedy people? Impose price controls (which have a long, storied history of not working and only leading to shortages and queues)?

We build economic policy around human nature, not otherwise. Humans will always seek to maximize profit at all costs. If you lock out foreign suppliers from competing using tariffs, local suppliers will reason that they can charge more and will rightly do so. And tariffs in one area end up affecting so many other areas in unforeseen ways. That's how tariffs on chemical fertilizer might end up affecting the price of something as mundane as bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

That's why free markets are important. They give buyers options, and sellers then have to lower their prices reasonably to be chosen/picked from that sea of options.

If you want lower prices, remove tariffs and trade restrictions.

A lot of domestic goods can be affected by the tariff war US is waging. We are a part of a global economy. Additionally, ICE raids are adding to the issue.

Even for products made in the US if other things increase the cost of running a business those costs will get passed on to the buyer. It takes LABOR to get bacon, lettuce and tomato....have you heard about ICE raids and crops getting wasted because people are not showing up to work? That will affect prices as less produce = higher prices as demand increases.

If equipment gets more expensive, then cost of produce gets more expensive. I work for a manufacturing company...under Trump our cost has been spiking due to insane tariffs....those costs are passed to people who make equipment and to farmers, then to YOU.

I'll hold my breath for the fast food chain that lowers its prices to better compete with the chains that raised theirs.

We have plenty of examples, with documentation and receipts, of businesses participating in price fixing, collusion, and other cooperative behaviors that result in higher prices for consumers and reduced competition between businesses.

You are naively assuming that all businesses express greed in the same way. Some of them realize they can make quite a lot of money with a lot less work by working together to raise prices. Not all markets are easy for a newcomer to break into, competition is far from guaranteed if the established players are cooperating.

Tariffs affect local product prices in a lot of ways.

1) They reduce competitive pressure so local producers can raise prices without losing market share (that is the actual point)

2) They increase local demand for production capacity and labor in general, driving up costs even in sectors that are completely unaffected by the tariffs themselves

This is true if and only if those products have no imported inputs, and if tariffs aren't causing general inflation which is forcing up wages of the people making them via cost-of-living increases.

Ultimately, unless you're an autarky (in which case tariffs are in any case irrelevant), high tariffs should be expected to lead to broad price increases, even for goods which are not directly imported.

Not even remotely true.

Wrong.

Just because something is happening for years doesn't mean there cannot be extra incentive to make it worse today. But you just handwaved tariffs away. and did the inflation go up by 0.9% in a month in those years?

Still, if the "real" inflation rate was ~10% starting in 1996 then a $5 burger today supposedly cost ~$0.30 in 1996.

A lot of soda vending machines will sell a 20oz bottle of soda for ~$2.50. Were soda vending machines selling bottles of soda for $0.15 back then? No.

> its value goes up

Its price goes up. "Price is what you pay, value is what you get"; houses do not increase in value over time.

All spending everywhere is essentially “salaries and compensation”. It’s not like you get to the end of the supply chain and suddenly are paying God. Money always goes to people.

That is only for people in the DoD.

Almost nothing that the DoD uses is made by the DoD. It's pretty much all 3rd party contractors, and those contractors handle paying their employees.

https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-d...

22%. But operations also includes civilian salaries and procurement naturally includes the labor required to produce what was procured. I would assume that R&D also includes research grants and salaries.

The companies that build and supply things for the military have to pay salaries and compensation, too.

Presumably that's only for DoD employees and people serving in the armed forces? It doesn't include defense contractor salaries.

they're not burning the money, it all goes into someone's pocket

If you're truly curious I would say the best way to start is to get a basic understanding of economics and how our current system actually operates. It's also important to look up the data as it actually exists rather than consuming conclusions from commentators without investigating further.

For instance your initial post seems to imply that we aren't balancing our defense vs social spending and are spending way too much on the former. However, that doesn't align with our current outlays. If you check out the latest US Treasury report the outlays for the current fiscal year shows $1314bn for Social Security, $841bn for interest payments on the debt, $823bn for medicare, $805bn for health, and $758bn for defense. The primary driver of debt in the future will be the entitlement programs and interest.

Of course the unfortunate reality is that most people do not have the time to learn about everything and do their own research so we will always rely on others to some extent for our information. The danger is when your world view fills in the gaps of knowledge you lack combined with the facts you believe you know taken from someone else who may be mistaken, misleading, or outright lying.

Yes. I'm from Spain, and here housing rental costs are included in inflation... but they're a 4% of the index. Which is laughable, as most people are spending more like 30%-50% of their income on rent.

The rationale is that most people (read: people over 50 or 60) live in houses they own, those spend 0 on rental, so if you calculate the average expenditure on rental, it's low. And buying houses counts as an "investment" so it's not included.

So basically what you say: totally gamed.

Al Jazeera reports around 750 US military bases, across the world but concentrated in Europe, Japan and South Korea, and the Middle East. Not quite bordering China. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

Hmmm let’s clear this up because the way you write is extremely click baity. I believe those higher numbers are less a military base and better thought of as a facility. They could be a small housing facility, radio station etc. it’s a valid number but I think base is probably not the right way to describe.

When you say China that is incredibly disingenuous. If we said Asia yeah sure and that is effectively Japan and Korea.

Now let’s think about it more in terms of major bases/complexes. We are looking at maybe 25 in and around Japan and 10 for Korea. Still not a small number but I think a very different mental picture than 900 bases mostly around China. Also worth nothing that’s probably around 80k people deployed in those two countries.

So no, no sources.

Why would you think those are good sources for a question like this?

This is not useful.

My point is that it's part of the standard basket and the rate they allegedly calculated for its growth didn't match up to lived experience.

Also, the list prices for tuition and what the average student actually pays out of pocket in the end can be two very different figures after grants and scholarships come into play.

And yes, absolutely, $80k a year in tuition is a massive outlier. Average in-state university tuition is closer to $12k-13k/yr, before grants and scholarships. The extreme majority of US undergraduates aren't shelling out $80k/yr for tuition payments.

You entered college over a decade ago. We’ve had a lot of inflation in that time.

From an inflation adjusted perspective, I’d actually rather pay $80K now than to have had to pay $60K in 2016 when you graduated.

You also probably know that most students don’t pay full price due to sliding scales.

$80k is basically $60k in 2012 dollars

People didn't need to go to college before the death of the middle class. A couple generations ago you could rent an apartment and have a decent life working at a restaurant or warehouse or factory. Now most entry level jobs pay poverty level wages.

Ok. But we can look at the inflation rate that the US reports, and the inflation rate that the EU reports. Then compare the ratio of those to how the exchange rate changes.

I don't see how having financial problems would make this comparison invalid.

That might be an explanation for as to why the inflation figures are what they are, but the math described above wouldn't change. If one currency is quickly being devalued while another isn't, it is going to be obvious when you try to exchange those currencies.

Who is we?

Europe != EU != Eurozone.

> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.

I would grant them the benefit of the doubt if English wasn’t their native language, but they’d identified as a US citizen elsewhere in the thread and their name strongly implies native speakership.

In the US, this conversational construction in this context is most reasonably interpreted as the second sentence completing the thought in the first.

If a manager asks an employee “how many dents are on the bumber?” A response of “I think the total number is close to 900”, that would be in reference to just the dents on the bumper, not all over the car.

Also, elsewhere in the thread, they’ve acknowledged they simply made the number up (by just repeating what a GPT said).

Perhaps English is not your native language. It at best comes across that many of the 900 are surrounding China and at worst that the 900 is referring to China.