livestock 1
Member
I think when we we’re all told to ‘run them all up the right way’ during Covid telling them what a fantastic job they were all doing made them even lazier than they were
Bank of England
- Thread starter nelly55
- Start date
Rich_ard
Member
That's what I do. Overdraft just keep risingThey all seemed to think they could borrow themselves out of debt
- Location
- Northumberland
Its all natural stone and welsh slate where we are.But i get what youre saying,they can buy stuff much cheaper.
Doing it for the kids
Member
If only this was true!
Oh look, food and restaurants are in two separate categories.
American inflation has an effect on UK interest rates, massive defence spending going on over there under the guise of money to Ukraine.
Third Stimulus Checks: $1,400 Payment Update - SmartAsset | SmartAsset
The American Rescue Plan includes a $1,400 third stimulus check. Updated timeline, targeted income limits, payment tables, tracking and tax requirements.
smartasset.com
Interesting piece in The Atlantic. I’ve trimmed it a fair bit to leave out some clueless political waffle. American perspective obvs but chimes with the UK.
Liberal politicians and economists don’t seem to recognize the everyday harms of rising costs.
These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?
Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.
But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.
Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.
“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”
The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.
Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.
According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.
Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.
The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.
The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.
All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment.
Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working papernoting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.
What the Upper-Middle-Class Left Doesn’t Get About Inflation - The At…
By Michael PowellApril 14, 2024Liberal politicians and economists don’t seem to recognize the everyday harms of rising costs.
These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?
Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.
But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.
Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.
“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”
The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.
Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.
According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.
Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.
The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.
The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.
All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment.
Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working papernoting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.
The modern world of business and politics take on bread and circuses, tell the suckers the price of circuses is down, because that’s where we make our big bucks, sod the price of bread, because the suckers have to buy it anyway, there’s nothing in it for us.
- Location
- Lincolnshire
It's an interesting article. But if you look at food prices, and how much of those are actually made up of energy and wages, and housing costs and how much of that is made up of interest rates, then it doesn't take a genius to see with cereals and energy down towards pre Ukraine prices that it's the banks actions and lack of wage restraint that has kept inflation high.
Wages Vs productivity is a more interesting story.
Actually the best thing the govt did was to keep the tax bands the same.
Wages Vs productivity is a more interesting story.
Actually the best thing the govt did was to keep the tax bands the same.
Money Week this week. Sums up why we’re stuck in this never-ending stagnation, prob more to do with political stupidity/timidity rather than BoE specifically (although they’re partly to blame for the Truss fiasco). That and the nonsensical Nut Zero dopiness and denial of reality. (When is the US going to be Nut Zero again?) Quite something when Biden appears to be luckier than our shower.
Expanded and improved Sustainable Farming Incentive offer for farmers published
Expanded Sustainable Farming Incentive offer from July will give the sector a clear path forward and boost farm business resilience.
From: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and The Rt Hon Sir Mark Spencer MP Published21 May 2024
Full details of the expanded and improved Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) offer available to farmers from July have been published by the...
From: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and The Rt Hon Sir Mark Spencer MP Published21 May 2024
Full details of the expanded and improved Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) offer available to farmers from July have been published by the...