What Millions of Data Points Reveal About US Inflation | Hacker News Reader

What Millions of Data Points Reveal About US Inflation

bloomberg.com

4 pointsBetelbuddy5 comments

Two things to pay attention to is the increasing prices of Laptops and all electronic appliances. Laptops which powered the world till date is seeing a massive hike in price and the normal buyers will have to suffer due to that.

Companies are bleeding cash on AI, Billions in commitment that no one can guarantee returns on and American Citizen's forced to invest into these companies via 401k, etc.

No one feels the pain of this more than the average consumer and the American middle class. Isn't this interesting, the world that is running on middle class is where they are the most neglected ones! Democracy they say.

One shouldn't forget is that every dollar that's spent on something, is a dollar not spent on something else. As long as both options are domestic and does not involve money being sent abroad, increase in price of one product means decrease of price in another, so in a way, gas prices cannot move overall inflation at all: gas, becoming more expensive, made other things cheaper by suppressing demand on them.

In the old days, oil in the US was mostly imported, so that wasn't the case: higher oil price meant just less money left for anything else, so economy could fall while prices rose (stagflation). Now, this is no longer the case, higher oil prices mean more money for everyone because US is a net exporter.

I am going to go ahead and doubt some here. If I have my bakery and the price of flour goes up because the price of wheat production goes up (for what ever reason) I will likely need to raise prices. Does it really matter if the reason for the more costly flour is domestic or abroad?

No; and same with gas. But no matter that, it will mean that prices for other things on the market that have nothing to do with bread or wheat, will go down, because people will have fewer dollars left in their pockets after buying bread.

Bread is actually a much better example than you probably think it is because just like with gas, demand on it is inelastic, people will buy it even if price goes up.

Difference with imported vs domestic oil (or wheat) is that if it is imported (or net imported at least), higher price means that everyone overall has less money in their pockets because some of it was sent abroad, so the economy may be suppressed, if the oil (or wheat) is domestic, it is other way around.

> gas, becoming more expensive, made other things cheaper by suppressing demand on them.

Nope, it may suppress demand for "other things" but doesn't make them cheaper. The making of "other things" uses gas too, as do their makers, so they have to increase their prices as well in order to compensate for the increased input costs.

The suppression of demand, if it materializes at all, has a natural floor, as does the reduction of margin - it's natural floor is 0 - past that, reduction of price is impossible. In fact, reduced output usually leads to higher costs per unit produced due to reduced economies of scale, as a result, lower demand often results in higher prices even if gas prices stay the same.

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