Bidenflation

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ex-khobar Andy
Posts: 5419
Joined: Sat Dec 19, 2015 4:16 am
Location: Louisville KY as of July 2018

Bidenflation

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

Well that's what the Daily Mail calls it. I'd love see a serious economist break down the current inflation figure to its component parts: world oil market; 'regular' inflation; Putin's war; and good old fashioned greed and opportunism.

Shell have announced record profits: $11.5 billion for the April to June 2022 quarter, up from a lousy $5.5 billion same quarter, last year. Centrica, the UK gas supplier, announced record profits of £1.3 billion for the first half of 2022 compared to a shoddy £262 million last year January to June.

But of course for those who want to think it, it's all Biden's fault. (I might have misused the word 'think' there. Sorry about that.)

Burning Petard
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Joined: Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:35 pm
Location: Near Bear, Delaware

Re: Bidenflation

Post by Burning Petard »

I have lots of trouble with this general conversation. Inflation is not an imperical quantity -- it is a RATE of CHANGE. All these 'record' inflation numbers are the present prices compared to a year ago. Is our memory that short? A year ago gas now seems cheap because at that time we were still hunkering down with the pandemic. I was afraid to eat out. I bought cheap groceries because that was what was easy to cook. (Two Costco cooked chickens would feed me for a week.) I bought lots of carrots and onions. Every day started with oatmeal.

Pent up demand now meets just-in-time inventory control.

"Free Market Forces" goes to only a few US suppliers of baby formula. Parents loved it when Abbott was cheap. Not so much when Mother Nature and the odds catch up with Abbott's corporate culture and the FDA shuts down yet another Abbott plant for dangerous manufacturing processes.


The same people who demand the Feds go away and let 'business' take care of itself are also demanding the President do something about retail gasoline prices. I guess these are all brilliant people because of the much quoted aphorism that consistency of the hobgoblin of little minds.

snailgate

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Bidenflation

Post by BoSoxGal »

So many Americans fail to grasp basic household finance, it’s too much to expect them to grasp larger economic forces and that holds true across the political spectrum.

It sucks that we’ve had a global pandemic killing millions of people and fracturing supply chains etc. It really sucks that greedy corporations have taken advantage of the situation to further gouge the American consumer. It extra special sucks that we have an illegal war between Russia and Ukraine thanks to Russia’s latest psychopathic dictator losing his mind in his elder age. Between that and the realization dawning in the global population that fossil fuel addiction is killing our world you have an industry desperate to make as much money as possible before the curtain falls. It’s all so irrational.

Of course none of this is Biden’s fault and he’s done a decent job of things considering all the factors working against him including the insanity of politics in the USA. In the next two elections it really is democracy on the ballot and hopefully the specter of the Trump Reich rising again will be enough motivation for people to look past all the petty stuff and turn out to vote against Trump and his ilk. Biden is simply not an enigmatic leader and he didn’t win in 2020 as much as Trump was defeated by people who couldn’t stand another day of his insanity. Hopefully Trump will continue exhibiting that insanity and he wins his party’s nomination, so everyone can vote again to show him he isn’t wanted.

But there is going to be blood in the streets either way. USA is in a soft civil war already, and things are heating up. This is our new normal until we can purge the urge toward fascism from our national psyche. Considering how long it has held onto us, I’m not sure how we do that.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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