Clickbait. The month-over-month rate of change "jumped," but that's just recovery of deflation in the prior three months. The overall inflation rate remains well below what it was for all of 2019.
Looks like it had a recent jump, but is still below the trend line. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL (You can zoom in on the recent year by using the slider at the bottom.)
The chart shows a modes uptick which follows a large drop. But neither the drop or the uptick take inflation to a level that’s unusual unusual compared to its recent history. Wake me up if it continues for another six months!
I agree this inflation story isn’t the story we should focus on. We should be doing everything to get our numbers under 1 new case per 100k people per day. We’re still having a 9/11 event every three days by death count.
Saying we have a “9/11 event every three days” is an excessively emotional and alarmist way to frame what’s happening.
600K people die in the US of cancer every year. If we took your framing, that means cancer is causing a 9/11 every other day. (Edit: did incorrect math here originally)
Please try to use emotionally neutral language when communicating to others about the pandemic. It has already been distorted and politicized in the public sphere enough, in both directions.
Cancer _is_ causing 200 9/11s every day, and people are freaked out by it. That's why we spend billions on cancer research every year. And if we could prevent cancer by simple changes to our lifestyle by wearing masks and social distancing, you can bet that most people (not all) would support it and look at people who don't with disgust.
I disagree with your trivialization of these deaths. I unironically presume that you have little empathy for individual deaths due to gun violence, accidents, and other tragedies, since those are even smaller in scope than the enormous number of people who die of cancer on a regular basis.
Edit: I also fell into the trap of not questioning your assumptions. 600k a year is 1,643 per day. So a 9/11 every two days. Closer to COVID in numbers than you presented. Still horrible. I stand by the rest of my post.
The comparison of covid and 9/11 is pretty clear. I did not bring it up for political points. It’s a very significant and recent historical event. 9/11 represented an attack on the US people on homeland territory by a foreign actor. Pandemics have been suggested widely as comparable to fighting a war on home territory. It’s just not as easy to spot the damage because pandemics don’t send in troops with guns and bombs. They spread insidiously from person to person through microscopic viruses. We have to fight the virus on it’s playing field-the routes it takes between hosts. The deaths from covid have been spread out across the population enough to not make as visible an impact as 9/11. Which is precisely why comparing the effects of covid to widely known historical events helps build an impression of the size and effect of the event.
Quote: “ The deaths from covid have been spread out across the population enough to not make as visible an impact as 9/11. Which is precisely why comparing the effects of covid to widely known historical events helps build an impression of the size and effect of the event.”
>And if we could prevent cancer by simple changes to our lifestyle by wearing masks and social distancing, you can bet that most people (not all) would support it and look at people who don't with disgust.
There's no guarantee that these things will prevent deaths; if there's no vaccine relatively soon all they'll achieve is delaying deaths. And social distancing is not a "simple lifestyle" change: it's a destructive, traumatic event that's destroyed more peoples' jobs, businesses and livelihoods than anything else in the past half century, and caused a massive increase in mental health issues and suicide: https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/advance-article/doi/10.1093/q....
I'm going to assume you're an introvert in some ivory tower tech job that allows working from home, otherwise I can't imagine how you could have so little empathy for the havock lockdowns are wreaking on ordinary working people's lives.
I'm probably not much like you imagine me, but I do understand this is affecting everyone differently. That said, social distance is NOT a quarantine. It is maintaining 6 feet where possible and wearing masks. Simple lifestyle change. The fact that you are conflating it with a total lockdown, which IS very problematic (but sometimes still necessary) is part of the problem.
Let's be grownups. Ideally, we quarantine for two weeks, followed by gradual reopening with actual social distancing. As long as people have hope and a plan, they can deal with a surprising amount of discomfort. If you don't get that, I assume you're a twenty something who's never had the patience to sacrifice your comfort for something much more important.
> I disagree with your trivialization of these deaths. I unironically presume that you have little empathy for individual deaths due to gun violence, accidents, and other tragedies, since those are even smaller in scope than the enormous number of people who die of cancer on a regular basis.
I literally “trivialized” nothing. Promoting the use of emotionally neutral language is not “trivialization.” Furthermore, the assumption that I “have little empathy for individual deaths” because I promote emotionally neutral language is both parody and shameful. Thank you for further proving my point.
You exaggerated cancer deaths by 400x to minimize what's happening with COVID (and BTW, were at 1k deaths a day, which is creeping up to be similar to the cancer number). You could start with walking back that claim, which was blatantly inaccurate and misleading.
I did walk the claim back but even if I didn’t citing what I thought was an accurate number is not trivializing. The overall point remains true, invoking 9/11 imagery when talking about covid death numbers is emotionally manipulative rhetoric and it does more harm than good.
In my opinion, "emotionally manipulative" is in the eye of the beholder. So in a way, you're both right. As for the underlying question of, is it helpful? I think it does help to visualize the scope of a disaster which people are asking to have trouble comprehending.
Like Stalin said, one death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.
In both cases, these are excess deaths that would not have otherwise occurred. That is not true of cancer. Your choice to downplay the comparison is as consciously political as GP's choice to point out the comparison.
If a crisis create supply problems, for instance, disrupting supply chains, inflation could increase.
Inflation is too much spending (not "printing") for too little capacity in the economy. You could get inflation for spending more than the economy can accept (but in normal times modern economies are rarely at full utilization), or, assuming full utilization, by keeping the same spending when what the economy can produce decrease for some reason.
In fact, despise what many people says, the second way is far more common that the first, including the infamous Zimbabwe (1).
No it does not totally depend on that. The inflation of stock valuations does, arguably, totally depend on loose monetary policy. But this is the consumer price index. That depends on demand, and demand remains low.
We are in seriously weird times. I take your point and know you’re rooted in basic economics as correct. But I also know Fed policy is pushing RE prices through the roof and the stock market has had high volatility due in part to Fed policy. The stock market seems to have some tie to how well people think things are going which may be reflected in consumer confidence thus demand. But yeah not the direct point I wrote above.
And quite expectably, stock prices inflate at larger rates than the prices of other goods.
Stats show that people save more cash than they did before corona. Very reasonable decision as times are more dangerous but it will be a major catastrophy when all of that money gets back into the economy.
I’m not really that concerned about inflation from people moving money from their savings to expenditures in the future. For one, deflation is way worse than inflation. For two, inflation isn’t as bad as widely assumed. If anything we’re seeing in real time how awful completely stable ie 0 rates can be on society as it’s pushed people into investments purely because There Is No Alternative (TINA).
The oddball hoarding is pretty scary-though seems to have been confined to the short term across all the things people hoarded.
Back to savings, people increasing their savings is a rational choice right now. For all they know they may need that to survive in the future. Those savings will probably sit on the sidelines until we reach herd immunity. Being that could be a year away and lots of time without meaningful work the savings are likely to be spent at non-inflationary rates. It’s much more likely people need further stimulus to avoid huge booms in homeless populations through rent and mortgage shortcomings.
This "recession" was due to government shutting down the economy and not economic reasons. When things are allowed to operate "normally" again, there is bound to be a bounce back. It also probably took a bit of time for the trillions in stimulus to have an effect. The indication of trillions more in stimulus coming probably doesn't hurt either.
