Key Points
- As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
- Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
- Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
The last time USA had extended deflation, the Great Depression happened. When people stop consuming, retailers fire their workers. Then fewer people can consume, so more people get fired. This goes on enough, then its not just stores who fire workers, but it trickles to factories, R&D, office workers, etc. etc. The longer deflation happens, the further it spreads and the more people lose their jobs.
Ever since the Great Depression happened, US Policy has been strongly anti-deflation. Our policy is to “err” on the side of slight inflation.
We’re only at risk for people stopping food consumption if prices don’t fuckin fix themselves, and I’m serious about that. People are gonna eat if they can eat.
COVID19 saw massive declines in food consumption, to the point where milk was dumped, pigs were slaughtered, chickens were culled.
US Policy under such times is to keep producing high amounts of food to ensure our food security and fund the dumping of milk, pigs, chickens, etc. etc. It takes years to grow an animal for slaughter, if we didn’t do that we would have had not enough meat as we came out of COVID19.
So much of our economy worked because we have policies and watchdogs thinking about economic policies. This sort of shit is invisible to the typical citizen, but is key to why our country came out on top, while others did not.
We still had a big blip in egg prices on the reverse end as we came out of COVID19 and people wanted fancier foods again. But we normalized pretty quickly in the great scheme of things, and our policy to explicitly waste food during recessionary times / deflationary times (like COVID19) was key to making sure our production pipeline remained full, and that our food supply remained secure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/coronavirus-farmers-killing-pigs.html
People will stop consuming meat if I dunno… meatpacking plants are full of COVID19 sickness and no one packs any meat. The pigs get shot / burried instead and the end-consumer goes without pork for a bit. This literally just happened a few years ago, so I’m surprised people don’t remember this…
We literally staved off an apocalyptic economic event through shear determination. We should be more proud of our accomplishment.
Eating meat doesn’t mean people aren’t eating though.
We didn’t eat that pork.
We shot those pigs and then buried them and left them to rot. No one got that meat.
Then a bunch of idiots who can’t read basic statistics complain about inflation and the rising cost of meat a few months / years later.
That’s the ‘Transitory’ argument to inflation. That the meat was a temporary blip. Fortunately (???) I think it turns out that other bits of inflation ended up being real so the 5.25% rate hike remained a good idea. But the meat and eggs inflation was likely a direct result of our COVID-19 emergency plans.
That’s not about prices being too high. It’s about people being too sick to do the work…
We are not at risk for any sort of sustained deflation. Inflation is currently over 3% (higher than the Fed’s target of 2%) and interest rates are very high. We have a lot of wiggle room if inflation starts dropping.
We currently have a high base interest rate set by the fed. The country can fight deflation easily by cutting the rate from its 5 base points, which will increase lending and spending
This shouldn’t be an issue now.
The debate is whether to cut the FFR yet.
I’m against it. But people are rightfully worried about deflation. Its a terrifying situation from an economic point of view.
But you’re right. There’s very little sign of deflation (yet). We can hold rates higher, and maybe even go another +.25% up. Inflation is at a safe level right now, not too high and not too low, but we need to stay on guard to make sure it stays in this golden zone, and move as appropriate.
There were too many new jobs (too little unemployment) again in January. So we might still have rates too low IMO.
The cause of the great depression was overextended credit and stock market gambling. Deflation was present because people didn’t have as much money (or credit) to spend, but it was merely a symptom of an economic downturn, not the cause.
If the Great Depression happened during COVID19 (2020), then we’d still be in the middle of it today (2024) and wouldn’t really be out of it until 2028.
The Great Depression started in 1929. It was exacerbated by terrible economic policies and continued to get worse until 8 years better, when finally new policies kicked in and brought us out of it.
The Deflationary spiral was a big part of the extended depression and the multi-year effects. This deflationary spiral was stopped by making gold illegal, allowing the USA to float its currency more arbitrarily (ie: forcibly cause inflationary effects to counter-act the deflationary spiral).
Between 1930 and 1933, 30% of money was wiped out. That’s a deflationary spiral by any measure. As money became more expensive, everyone in debt (ie: credit cards today) would be worse.
If you owed $100 in 1930, you effectively owed $130 in 1933, because all money got more valuable ($100 in 1933 was like having $130 in 1930). Imagine if that happened today: that everyone’s student loan debts, mortgages, and other debts just suddenly became more valuable nominally. It’d be horrific and extend the problem.
We only got out of the great depression because of world war 2. Any policy pales in comparison. It was a huge government spending program that employed many. It also meant a lot of working age men died, shrinking the labor pool, thus putting upward pressure on wages. The generous social programs helped, as did the fact that US infrastructure wasn’t destroyed like it was in Europe.