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.
So what happens when retail workers don’t get paid enough to consume even with jobs?
Prices drop, causing more people to get fired. IE: The Great Depression. Or if you want a modern economy that’s undergoing this shift, just look at China right now.
If people can’t afford things, your only choice is to fire workers and drop prices further. That’s just economics. (Why do you need workers? No one is buying anything, so fire your workers. Duh). The more people realize that this is the only strategy to survive, the lower prices get, the more people get fired, and the less that people can consume. It gets worse and worse until economists change policy and pull you out of this.
This is why we have large pseudo-government central banks keeping watch over our economy. Deflation cannot be tolerated. Yes, inflation sucks, but at least people still have jobs and livelyhoods in times of inflation or hyperinflation even. That’s actually survivable. Deflation is NOT survivable, it sucks so much worse. Deflation is all-hands-on-deck we need to work together kind of situation. We never want to push the economy to that direction.
China isn’t doomed btw. China’s plan is to exports goods to Europe and hope that Europe buys enough Chinese crap that they can kickstart demand again. And as prices drop further and further, Chinese goods will get cheaper, and crap like Temu will pop up to sell these cheaper goods to everyone. Now there’s geopolitical repercussions to this (not everyone will want to support such “dumping” of goods into our countries), so there’s no guarantee that China will be successful on this front.
In that case tie minimum wage to inflation so no matter how bad inflation gets the poorest don’t lose their shirts (and stop consuming)
Oh, so in times of deflation you want minimum wages to drop automatically? Deflation is “negative inflation”. I’m talking about the inverse scenario compared to what you’re talking about. Sorry, that sounds like a terrible idea.
And unfortunately for your argument… despite the high amount of inflation in 2022 and 2023, consuming rose dramatically. Or did you forget how ridiculously overpriced everything got, all those shoes / collectables people bought and the stock market skyrocketing as too much money was flooding the markets?
That’s called an “overheated economy”, too many people did too well during the times of inflation. That’s… kind of the problem. Inflation happens when lots of people make more money.
IE: Emperically speaking, we can just look at the results of the last ~3 years of the USA’s economy. Consuming went up with inflation, just as expected. There’s no need to “encourage” consuming during inflationary bubbles.
In fact, what got inflation under control was the huge amounts of +Interest Rates encouraged by the FFR. Did you not notice the dramatically higher credit card rates that are cutting into people’s budgets? That’s almost by design, increasing the FFR increases all loan costs (house mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans). That’s how we fix inflation, by kind of destroying money / taking money away from people.
We should have increased taxes instead IMO, so that our budget could have been managed better. But whatever, inflationary-bubbles are caused by over-consumption. The goal when inflation/hyperinflation is occurring is to cut back on consuming, and you discourage that by doing policies that are deflationary in nature.
IE: The Fed is currently slamming on the brakes (ie: doing policies that risk a deflation right now), to cut back on the chances of inflation. That’s why retailers are scared, they’re worried that the Fed is pumping the brakes too hard / increasing interest rates too much right now.
So should wages for poor people ever go up, in your opinion?
What’s your opinion on legislation that would tie wages to their ROI for the business?
Edit: Why not force large corporations to pay their CEOs less so they can raise wages for their employees while keeping prices the same? It seems like you/economists realize corporations will let the country go to shit while stealing as much of the profit as possible and prefer that average workers deal with the detrimental impacts.
More like wages are kind of irrelevant from a macroeconomic perspective. Money doesn’t matter. We can double our money supply tomorrow and it won’t make anyone’s lives easier.
See Argentina’s minimum wage, and tell me if that solved any problem at all.
But… if increasing the minimum wage makes you feel better I’m not against it. I just don’t think its the right focus to have on a policy front.
That sounds like a good way to kill innovation, as most companies that innovate lose money year-over-year for long periods of time.
The entire damn point of the stock market is to take people who like to take risks with their money (ie: investors), give them a story about how money line goes up, and “trick” investors into shoveling money into money-losing businesses until those businesses catch a good wind and make money.
In many cases (ie: MoviePass), everything collapses and everything sucks afterwards. In other cases (ie: Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple), life gets better in the long term. Its near impossible to tell the difference (do you think Uber is going to collapse? Or do you think Uber will become another major player of our economy? Do you think NVDA deserves all the extra money they got last week? Or is that a bubble?). But the important thing is that the USA has a large group of shareholders and investors who like making such risks, and who take the responsibility (ex: lose tons of money) if these bets go sour.
The goal is for us as an overall economy to make new things, and improve the lives of everyone. Money strangely enough, doesn’t do that. We improve the lives of everyone by producing more, thereby giving everyone more dishwashers, homes, cars or whatever they need.
The big problem with the current “economy” isn’t anything in general. USA’s general economy is actually very good and people should be proud of what USA has accomplished in the past 3 years. The reasons why life sucks are outside of what economic forces can do. Ex: Housing prices skyrocket because we’ve been building fewer and fewer houses each year for the last 20 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
This is despite population growing more-and-more.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPGROWUSA
So guess what happens when housing supply drops while population increases? No one can afford a house, and there’s no economic policy you can do to force people into buying houses (ex: increasing wages) because there’s simply not enough houses in our country.
Until we build more houses, we ain’t gonna get more affordable houses (at any wage). The focus on money is counter-productive. The focus needs to be on houses or other goods/services in the economy. (Ex: not enough nurses, not enough doctors, not enough etc. etc. etc.)
Investors/shareholders risking their own money to make new services, new goods, new technologies is fine. That’s the part of our economy that works. The problem is that we’ve got a $HundredBillion plowing into crap companies that won’t do anything ever… but somehow somewhere our economy has forgotten the basics like housing starts. Maybe its regulatory (too many NIMBY laws that outlaw cheap housing), or something. But we have the investor-money, we have the culture, we have the materials. We just need to actually build the damn houses.
One issue with raising taxes as a tactic for slowing money supply growth is that it is not very agile. Once inflation gets back under control, Congress is not automatically going to lower the tax rate. I do agree that we should raise taxes but that’s more for four the budget deficit and the high wealth inequality.
China is doomed for a number of other economic factors, deflation is just the symptom.
China’s housing crisis is the primary driver. The Chinese saw land as the primary means of savings and investment for the last twenty years. Much of the economy and state funding was driven by a demand for investment housing. Now that that has stalled many people’s savings have been wiped out.
Couple that with trade wars brought in by an aggressive foreign policy and it makes for a very challenged economic environment. China’s very centralized top down decision making process is great for directing growth but it struggles to address a number of issues at the same time to the point of paralysis.
China is facing an existential crises that is only starting to unfold.
Imagine if China made “goods” instead of shit.
China has a lead on US manufacturing in a number of areas. I mean beyond just labor.
Apple iPhone motherboards and assembly is in China and I think everyone agrees its a very high quality phone. Its no cheap PCB either, but a relatively advanced 10+ layer board with a huge number of chips, components. With volumes that no US company can sustain.
We need to learn from China, but we also need to avoid the absolute crap / bullshit / economic failures of China while doing so.
There’s nothing to learn from China. They “learned” their manufacturing base from the US, when the wealthy leveraged trade deals to make production as cheap as possible. China has no equivalent to OSHA, doesn’t value human life or safety standards, and has weak environmental regulations in comparison to the US. The US has incredible potential especially as automation gets leveraged but we’re forever hamstrung by our bullshit economics and “line go up for shareholders” system thanks to our corrupt politicians. We have nothing to learn from China except that totalitarian states are worse than our oligarchs.
In fairness, the reason garbage comes from China’s factories is the US corporations that place orders for consumerist trash. My subtle point was, imagine if China’s “customers” valued quality over cheap production. Ever heard of Chinesium?
You ever hear of the iPhone?
You ever hear of Shenzhen? Its a city for electronics in China. Its completely different from anything available in the USA, believe me I’ve looked.
You might want to look at China again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq_aeq2NTVE
China is incredibly automated. A ton of heavy machinery / automation is made in China. See JLCPCB youtube link above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1IpTtRV9Sg
You think China doesn’t know how to use machines to automatically make pcb boards? Do you think a human actually was placing every single component in an iPhone?
The reason why Shenzen can create items cheaper than USA is because they have a larger volume, larger scale, more automation and superior logistics. Its time for us to learn the basics from China again. Even in China, you ain’t gonna get technicians or electrical engineers who can use these manufacturing lines at minimum wage. These are highly skilled workers, in a city full of EEs sharing knowledge and working together.
Apple chose China as a manufacturing site not because it was cheaper, but because it was higher quality and more flexible than the USA supply lines. That was over 15 years ago. People need to wake up to the manufacturing beast that China has become.
That being said, Chinese economic policy remains utter shit. So we still can pull ahead of them. But China’s out-automating us and has cheaper labor. Legions of pick-and-place machines, CNC Mills, 3d printers, pcb soldering… (enough to mass produce the iPhone) all exists in China.
Automation? China’s got more pick-and-place machines, they got more soldering ovens, they got more stencil masks than us. We need to start catching up to them.
USA has the advantage in energy though. So whatever automation we make here in the USA will be cheaper due to our cheaper energy. China still relies upon importing from Russia and other countries, while USA is largely self-sufficient for energy.
Seriously I don’t know much about Shenzhen but damn it has to be one of the most unique places on earth in terms of having such a nexus of skilled engineers, technicians and production chains for computer chips.
Yeah it is a tragedy people aren’t paid a living wage :( but if tomorrow Shenzhen just abruptly disappeared from the earth we would be in big trouble as there isn’t really “just somewhere else” where what happens at Shenzhen can happen in terms of the global production of sophisticated electronics.
Wellllll… not chips. Taiwan does that.
China / Shenzhen is more of assembly. PCB boards and the like. Very important to the computer process. China is trying to crack the chip problem as well, but they’re not quite there yet. (Taiwan, Korea, and USA are all ahead of China when it comes to chips specifically).
But chips are useless without a PCB, and China is incredibly good at PCBs / assembly. To the point where no one else aside from China can seemingly compete at this.
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.
That’s not about prices being too high. It’s about people being too sick to do the work…
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.
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.
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.
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.