Hacker News Reader

Comment by rank0 | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s easy to miss some of the very real pain lower income folks are experiencing right now if you’re not in their bracket. Inflation causes excess capital to flow into assets, which the poor don’t have and HN commenters do.

The inflation issue is absolutely not solved. A single month from 9.1 -> 8.6 is FAR too soon for victory. I suspect the recent rally in the market comes from the assumption that the Fed will back off and that we have indeed already experienced peak inflation.

CPI of 8.6 is still unacceptable and my guess is we’re gonna see more rate hikes and QT than the markets expect. That’ll mean mortgage rates go up, companies will have more difficulty servicing debt…etc

We’re not in the clear quite yet!

View on HN

The move from 9.1 to 8.6 is due to a single month of zero.

People forget that 11/12th of the data for the yearly number already happened when they see the new number each month.

It’s not impossible that inflation is just 0% from here on out and yet it will still take a while for the yearly number to come down.

I mean, I don't want to discount that many people are suffering, but real income growth for the bottom 50% of earners has gone up substantially over the last year (and, notably, have gone up more than for high-earners, percentage-wise). Rising prices are bad and all, but if wages go up more than prices, as they seem to have done, then on aggregate people should be doing better, not worse.

Inflation causes excess capital to flow into assets, which the poor don’t have and HN commenters do.

I'm not sure I agree with this, as inflation seems to have scared markets off of their peaks. I mean, they're not down that far, but I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation. Maybe this is true for some assets, but unless I'm missing something, markets in general do not seem to be feeding off of inflation in the way you're describing here.

It’s longer term. CPI just measures a weighted prices of a basket of goods/services. In reality, the purchasing power of the dollar moves quite a bit outside the CPI basket because people absolutely spend their capital outside that basket.

> I don't see a lot of upper middle-class folks profiting off of this situation.

Look around more! We’ve witnessed the greatest bull market in history and It’s largely due to the government pouring trillions of dollars into securities. Look at returns on equity and real estate since QE started in ‘08. Poor people aren’t the ones benefiting off our insane 14 yr rally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com