Inflation

We Need To Build The Architecture Of Our Future

June 24, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Enregy, Food and Agriculture, Global Economy, Inflation

In April 2022, the United Nations established the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance. This group is tracking the three major crises of food inflation, fuel inflation, and financial distress. Their second briefing, released on 8 June 2022, noted that, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic: the world economy has been left in a fragile state. Today, 60 per cent of workers have lower real incomes than before the pandemic; 60 per cent of the poorest countries are in debt distress or at high risk of it; developing countries miss $1.2 trillion per year to fill the social protection gap; and $4.3 trillion is needed per year – more money than ever before – to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is a perfectly reasonable description of the distressing global situation, and things are likely to get worse.

Brussels At Near-Standstill As Cost-Of-Living March Draws 70,000

June 21, 2022 Reuters. Resist! Austerity, Belgium, Brussels, Inflation

Around 70,000 Belgian workers marched through Brussels on Monday demanding government action to tackle sharply rising living costs, as one-day strikes at Brussels Airport and on local transport networks nationwide brought public travel to a near-halt. Protesters carried flags and banners reading "More respect, higher wages" and "End excise duty", while some set off flares. Some demanded the government do more, others said employers needed to improve pay and working conditions. Unions said about 80,000 were present. Police put the figure at 70,000. Brussels Airport said it could not allow passenger flights to depart because the industrial action extended to security personnel, and most arrivals were also cancelled.

Three Anti-Inflation Alternatives To Raising Interest Rates

June 16, 2022 Richard D. Wolff, In These Times. Create! Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Socialization

A deafening silence defines “debates” among U.S. leaders about stopping or slowing today’s inflation. Alternatives to the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates and curtailing money supply growth are ignored. It’s as if there were no other ways to rein in price increases except to add more interest costs to the already excess debts of workers and small and medium businesses. Were the last two and a half years of the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, plus the economic crash of 2020, not sufficient enough burdens on Americans without piling on the additional burden of inflation that has been imposed by U.S. capitalism? As usual, the profit-driven concerns of big business and their result — a remarkably selective historical amnesia — fuel the silence about alternative anti-inflation policies.

Prices For Workers Rise By More Than 9%

June 13, 2022 Masao Suzuki, Fight Back News. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Wages, Worker Rights and Jobs

San José, California - On Friday, June 10, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that prices for workers’ families, the so-called Consumer Price Index-Wage or CPI-W rose by 9.3% as compared to prices a year ago. This rate of inflation is near a 40-year high, only exceeded by the 9.4% increase in March. The last time that prices rose so quickly was in November of 1981. The headline number that the corporate media reported was a smaller 8.6%. This was the number for the CPI-Urban or CPI-U that includes households with managers and professionals as well as wage workers. The CPI-W inflation is higher than the CPI-U because the CPI-W puts more weight on the prices of food and transportation that have been bedeviling working families. Food prices are up more than 10% over the past year while gasoline is up almost 50%.

Ominous Economic Distress In India: No Buying Power, No Jobs, Rising Prices

June 8, 2022 Subodh Varma, People's Dispatch. Educate! India, Inflation, Jobs, Neoliberalism

Recently released estimates of India’s economic output show that people are not spending enough. The only reason this can be is because they do not have sufficient income, and their buying power is limited. On the other hand, prices of all essential commodities are increasing at a disturbingly high rate. This will further restrict spending. Industrial production has grown at snail’s pace, and with people not having enough to spend, demand will continue to be low and industrial output too will languish. Bank credit for large industries is growing very slowly. So, prospects of any check on raging unemployment continue to be bleak because there is unlikely to be a fresh investment that would create jobs.

US Federal Reserve Says Its Goal Is ‘To Get Wages Down’

May 26, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. Educate! Federal Reserve, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Worker Rights and Jobs

The chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, said his goal is “to get wages down.” In a press conference on May 4, Powell announced that the Fed would be raising interest rates by half a percentage and implementing policies aimed at reducing inflation in the United States, which is at its highest level in 40 years. According to a transcript of the presser published by the Wall Street Journal, Powell blamed this inflation crisis, which is global, not on the proxy war in Ukraine and Western sanctions on Russia, but rather on US workers supposedly making too much money. “Employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years,” Powell complained. The Fed’s proposed solution: bring down wages.

The Energy/Food Crisis Is Far Worse Than Most Americans Realize

May 17, 2022 Richard Heinberg, Resilience. Educate! Energy, Finance and the Economy, Food and Agriculture, Inflation, Oil and Gas

Everyone who owns a gasoline-burning car has noticed that fuel prices have shot up in recent weeks. And most of us have read headlines about high energy prices driving inflation. But very few Americans have any inkling just how profound the current energy crisis already is, and is about to become. This lack of awareness is partly due to economists, and those who depend on economists’ readings of the tea leaves of daily data (a group that, sadly, includes nearly all politicians and news purveyors). Recently I heard an NPR staff commentator confidently state: “The only way to get gasoline prices under control is to get inflation under control.” Anyone who understands recent events and how economies work will immediately realize that the statement is ass backwards.

The Food Crisis Didn’t Begin With The War In Ukraine

May 7, 2022 Jim Goodman , In These Times. Educate! Food and Agriculture, Inflation, Ukraine, Wars and Militarism

Even before the war in Ukraine, farmers across the U.S. were getting ready for higher prices on seed, fertilizer and crop chemicals. All winter, major farm media was warning farmers to book supplies early as prices would be high and supplies would be short. The war has only amped up the concern among farmers and input suppliers. Like the oil companies that cited the sanctions on Russian oil to justify steep price increases (even though Russian oil continues to flow almost without interruption), corporate agribusiness has used the war as a justification to ramp up fertilizer, seed and chemical prices even further, leading Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to ask the Justice Department to investigate whether “every penny of these increases” is warranted.

Price Controls Could Tame Inflation

May 5, 2022 Wenonah Hauter, Otherwords. Create! Corporatism, Inflation, Price Controls

Though corporate America would like us to believe otherwise, the retail prices of essential goods like food and energy are not set by simple supply and demand. In large part, they’re determined by the corporate cartels that have vanquished their competitors — and Wall Street speculators who place bets on the future availability of commodities. With price hikes for energy, gas, and food remaining stubbornly high, it’s time to do something about it. That’s why some experts now support a fix that was long considered taboo: limiting what corporations can charge for certain goods. In other words, price controls. Price controls tend to outrage many economists and business-friendly politicians. But curbing excess profits and making essentials more affordable would be politically smart — and effective.

A Monetary Reset Where The Rich Don’t Own Everything

May 4, 2022 Ellen Brown, Scheer Post. Create! Debt, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, wealth inequality

In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors’ prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land. This could be done because the king was the representative of the gods who were said to own the land, and thus was the creditor to whom the debts were owed. The same policy was advocated in the Book of Leviticus, though it is unclear to what extent this biblical Jubilee was implemented. That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can’t be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out.

I Cannot Live On Tomorrow’s Bread

April 29, 2022 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Global Economy, Inflation

On April 19, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its annual World Economic Outlook, which forecasted a severe slowdown in global growth along with soaring prices. ‘For 2022, inflation is projected at 5.7 percent in advanced economies and 8.7 percent in emerging market and developing economies – 1.8 and 2.8 percentage points higher than projected in … January’, the report noted. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva offered a sobering reflection on the data: ‘Inflation is reaching the highest levels seen in decades. Sharply higher prices for food and fertilizers put pressure on households worldwide – especially for the poorest. And we know that food crises can unleash social unrest’.

One Simple Trick To Protect Workers From Inflation

April 29, 2022 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Strategize! Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Inflation is an economic phenomenon whose nuances remain a mystery even to economists. That hasn’t stopped politicians from wielding it as a weapon to villainize anyone they wish, from environmentalists (blamed for rising gas prices) to annoying outsiders (condemned for driving up housing costs). In reality, we know one group will always pay the price for inflation and bear the burden of increasing costs: working people. Yet the most important practical tool for protecting workers from the ravages of inflation — unionization— is almost totally absent from today’s panicked political dialogue. In the same way that seemingly every foreign war is compared with World War II, every bout of high inflation in America triggers immediate comparison to the late 1970s.

Corporate Profits Have Contributed Disproportionately To Inflation

April 25, 2022 Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Child Care, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Taxes

The inflation spike of 2021 and 2022 has presented real policy challenges. In order to better understand this policy debate, it is imperative to look at prices and how they are being affected. The price of just about everything in the U.S. economy can be broken down into the three main components of cost. These include labor costs, non-labor inputs, and the “mark-up” of profits over the first two components. Good data on these separate cost components exist for the non-financial corporate (NFC) sector—those companies that produce goods and services—of the economy, which makes up roughly 75% of the entire private sector. Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019.

Child Care And Elder Care Investments Are A Tool For Reducing Inflation

April 11, 2022 Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute. Create! Finance and the Economy, Health Care, Inflation

Policymakers should look for any tool that can help restrain inflationary pressures without causing significant collateral damage. One such tool could be investments in child care and elder care. By subsidizing families’ use of child care and elder care and providing direct investments to providers, such investments could boost future labor supply by allowing working-age parents and children who want to look for paid employment to do so while remaining confident their family members are receiving care. Further, these investments can help dampen inflationary pressures—that rising wages could in theory contribute to—even well before they fully take effect.

Global Food Shortages: How Does Your Garden (Or Pantry) Grow?

March 30, 2022 Thomas Knapp, Counter Punch. Educate! Famine, Finance and the Economy, Food Access, Inflation

“President Joe Biden and other leaders of the world’s major industrialized democracies pledged action on Thursday [March 24] to address food shortages caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine,” Politico reports. Biden says food shortages “are going to be real,” although he seems to see them as an opportunity to increase US grain production and food exports rather than a real threat to Americans’ own well-being. After a year of continuing his predecessor’s “trade war” policies, Biden seems to be getting some free trade religion, which is nice, but he may be under-estimating the scope of the problem. The Russian invasion of Ukraine — and the US/EU/NATO sanctions response — doesn’t just up-end the global supply of grain crops (Russia and Ukraine are both top exporters of wheat) and other foods.

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