*jobs exist that don’t pay a living wage, sending workers ever deeper into poverty and despair*
media and politicians: “LoOk At AlL tHe JoBs! BoOmInG eCoNoMy!”
Voters don’t care about the economy as long as their cost of living situation is worse.
Biden has called out the greed of businesses, but we’ve seen no action from the government to rein them in.
The rate of increase is slowing rapidly: In December, prices for food consumed at home were up by just over 1 percent, according to the Labor Department. But administration officials say Mr. Biden is keenly aware that prices remain too elevated for many families, even as key items, like gasoline and household furnishings, are now cheaper than they were at their postpandemic peak.
And yet there is a general belief across administration officials and their allies that there is little else Mr. Biden could do unilaterally to force grocery prices down quickly.
“It’s hard to figure out what the short-term policy response is in this situation,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a former economic aide to Mr. Biden and an author of a report on grocery-price inflation that the progressive Groundwork Collaborative in Washington published on Friday.
I think we can expect Biden to be loud about grocery prices and grocery store profit margins, because the price of almost everything else has stabilized or gone down. He can issue executive orders that do little to directly influence prices, but any more would require legislation, and, well, the party that controls the House wants higher prices.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/us/politics/biden-food-prices.html
How is Biden supposed to have done anything to rein in corporate greed when he’s stuck with a Republican controlled house that refuses to even entertain the faintest notion of the slightest hint of the merest idea of reining it in?
Booming for who exactly?
Me?
Gas prices are below $3 here, only spent $91 on weekly groceries yesterday, and my high interest savings accounts are sitting around 4.75%
My property taxes went up 20% but that’s a local thing…
And I’ll toss this in here even though you’ll cry that it’s not a valid metric, but my retirement accounts are at a record high
Like, what more do you want??
House prices to contract down to a realistic level. Rent controls such that the price of rent is not higher than the price of a mortgage (which gives you ownership of a valuable asset, a tenancy does not).
But rent has to cover all the costs of ownership and then some, meanwhile the mortgage payment is but a fraction of that.
$91 for a week of groceries? You either live alone or your poor family is subsisting on Top Ramen.
That retirement account is going to mean fuckall when you retire as inflation eats up most of it.
I don’t know why this guy’s getting downvoted. Rent prices are at record high. APRs are through the roof. Groceries are getting more expensive every year. I’m even paying $20 more every month for car insurance. Sure Trump was worse but let’s not act like everything is all sunshine and rainbows just because it’s an election year.
Google seems t suck these days and I wasn’t able to find good data, but
- I see historical graph of car interest rates peaking over 8% in November, but current advertised rates 4-7%
- I see mortgage rates peaked in Sept and headed down. Most predictions I see are down or at least consistent - I didn’t see any predicting up
- gas prices are much cheaper lately
- my savings account t just went up again, I think it’s now paying 4.5%
Gotta admit it’s tough to sympathize with a $20 insurance increase when I just got hit with the double whammy of teenaged driver and new car. My car insurance is quintuple what it was a couple months ago😒
A shocking amount of people I know, including myself were all laid off. Ive been unemployed for 6 months. There are zero jobs in my Ruby red shithole state aside from retail.
This growth is not distributed equally.
There’s still a full on America+China+EU sized market crash boiling under that “booming” surface. I don’t know quite how they staved it off with just Credit Suisse and two other banks imploding so far. But it’s not done, it’s not finished, it hasn’t even started.
No idea what backroom deals were done in the financial sector to stop it all for now, but it’s still coming. Otherwise corporations wouldn’t still be bleeding the plebs dry with cost of living and trying to offset their shitty investments on the CBMS as well as fighting tooth and nail to keep students indebted forever, so the party can keep on rolling.
It’s an utter clusterfuck. We’ll see what happens in the next few years.
Credit Suisse and two other banks imploding so far
Don’t forget Evergrande
Here’s a Plain Bagel video on why the Evergrande liquidation isn’t as big a deal as lots of other people are hyping, at least to the world economy
No mention of swaps, no mention of debt lending and loaning. Evergrand’s impact doesn’t just come from the shit it does in China with the real estate. As a publicly traded company, there are many financial instruments tied to that single stock that have nothing at all to do with the real estate side of things.
No offense, but I’m so burnt out of this finance crap, everyone is lying, the whole thing is a pointless big casino. Reading anything about finance anywhere is as reliable as reading TASS (or Ukrainian) reports from the war in Ukraine.
Nothing ever is a big deal, then everything comes down and a bunch of flapjacks who caused it are laughing and drinking champagne above the sea of desperate people protesting the whole charade.
I gotta admit dude, this just smells like made up conspiracies. That Credit Suisse and 2 regional US bank shock happened almost a year ago. If those were emblematic of systemic issues, the failures would have continued, but they were instead just the result of bad governance and decision-making at each individual institution. The world economy absorbed those failures and moved on a long time ago.
And do you really think businesses need this excuse to raise prices? What about good old fashioned greed? Regarding prices either way, they’ve gone down in almost every sector of the economy besides groceries. High grocery prices definitely hurt the most, though, and I hope Biden can help influence grocers to charge less
I don’t think they need excuses, no. But there is a limit to how much you can realistically get out of a stone.
The world economy has absorbed fuck all, because a lot of, if not all, bad debt is still floating around the markets, hidden in swaps overnight repo, and similar mechanics. I don’t care if you believe me, it’s crazy talk for sure. It doesn’t even matter a single bit if I am right, because there’s fuck all to do about it for most day to day people. I’m also not being alarmist in: OH BUY GOLD NOW, PREP YOUR BUNKERS!!!
I would much rather be wrong here. Would be fan-fucking-tastic, and if I am, good. That’d be literally the best for everyone.
All I’m saying is, the underlying issues that keep leading to these market upsets aren’t resolved and CS, et al are just minor break outs of a major issue that keeps bubbling and boiling. Fucked if I knew when it’ll blow, but the next time it does, will be bigger than anything we’ve seen. Just these three banks failing in 2022 was already much larger in value than the entirety of 2008-2009 collapses.
Again, it doesn’t matter what I think or say. I don’t know if I’m right either, how could I? No one does. I just believe that it’s much more likely that the same fucks that caused 2008, who never saw any consequences whatsoever and are still running the show, never changed their greedy underhanded and horrible ways and 2008 was never resolved either, than all of them having a change of heart and never doing anything shifty or illegal ever again, cross their hearts and hope to die.
“Economy” is such a bullshit term here. What they really mean is stock market. The real economy is shit. Pay is shit. Healthcare is shit. Real estate is a fat hog that needs to get slaughtered already. When will the people be treated as Too Big To Fail?
Some people are already too big to fail. It’s just not you or me.
Look at Trump. He’s too big to fail. He’s not in jail, despite numerous counts of accusations, from rigging elections to treason to sexual assault.
When you’re rich enough or connected enough, you’re too big to fail.
If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
– J. Paul Getty
It’s worse, when it’s us g peoples donated election money for personal expenses, including legal expenses. Do the people donating understand that they’re not even getting a campaign out of their cash? Why isn’t this misuse of funds yet another criminal charge?
Ehh, I think the economy is doing okay. Inflation is being controlled/managed. In some cases it’s correcting itself.
Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. The media in this country has been really pessimistic about the economy and blaming the admin–to the point it seemed intentionally misrepresented.
This economy could have gone the other way pretty easily especially with the billions thrown into circulation during the pandemic.
If we want to credit Presidents when the economy is bad, you need to credit them when it’s good too.
If anything this admin should get credit for being stable and a source of order in all of the chaos–not the cause of it.
Ehh, I think the economy is doing okay. Inflation is being controlled/managed. In some cases it’s correcting itself.
I have to agree. Some people are still certainly struggling, of course. Homelessness is still a problem in places. Many people still live paycheck to paycheck. But the economy isn’t going to fully right itself in four years, especially with a hostile House that controls the purse strings.
Additionally, nothing has been done about greedflation (yet?). If Congress or Biden can figure out a way to force companies to stop tacitly colluding to squeeze more money from people, I would suspect more people would start to feel more optimistic about their finances (and the economy in general).
Greed will sadly have to wait…when your ship is sinking you gotta patch the holes first, then you can rebuild the troublesome parts.
The US is putting fingers in the holes of the dam right now and doing an okay job of it.
It’s about jobs more than the stock market. The report says over 350k net jobs added in January (more than double expected) and unemployment has been below 4% for two consecutive years (not seen since the ‘60s). Plus inflation is quickly dropping and the administration is lowering costs on things where they can, putting more money in our pockets. It’s legitimately incredible what’s happened with the US economy since the pandemic nearly guaranteed a recession, according to Fox News.
The numbers for the real economy have been good too. The median wage rose faster than inflation in 2023 and unemployment has been consistently low, people are finding work and finally starting to earn more. Obviously things aren’t great for everyone but it’s going way better than anyone expected and it’s heading in a good direction rather than deteriorating further like when inflation was still out of control.
