@SteveRoth @Mdavd @delong Over the past few years (since his 2018 misstep), Powell rebranded himself as leading a newly labor supportive Fed. Now we have some pudding to taste.
Richard Hanania is a guy who (to his credit or discredit) is willing to acknowledge that much of his ("antiwoke") project is motivated by an aesthetic many of us might describe as fashy. Problematic would be an understatement. But he distinguishes himself by offering takes you'd not predict from his political identity, and these can be interesting. Though still plenty, um, problematic.
"Why the Media is Honest and Good" is one of these https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good
@chrisp That’s a very misleading snippet, because all the figures are year over year! CPI inflation from July 1 through Dec 31 ran at 1.9% annualized. (From Dec 1 to Dec 31, it was -0.1%, or -1.2% annualized, but there’s too much noise in monthly data to predict ongoing outright deflation.) The first half of 2022 was a serious inflation. The second half… well, poof, it was gone. Numbers that include the first half will look scary, but they are also old news.
@Mdavd @delong there’s this basic issue that the main plausible evidentiary basis for continuing inflation risk is strong wage growth, and like unit-labor-costs of decades past, that’s a measure that conflates inflation and labor share, so you wonder if it isn’t labor share that’s really worth (to Jay Powell) tightening into a recession to forestall.
@delong it’s understandable that inflation risks are more present and plausible but in the past, but are there evidentiary grounds (beyond precaution) that would justify that view? if not so much, perhaps inflation stands in for something else motivating the reasoning?
@stephenjudkins so a “profits recession” as firms compete for labor (and an easy money recession, given normal interest rates among people addicted to near zero). normally though, we wouldn’t call that a recession (without scarequotes). it’s just how Davos crowd expresses sad faces? or will there be some misery-loves-company, fuck-this-labor-market via “animal spirits” or the Fed? will elites enforce our obeisance to business “confidence” a la Kalecki?
@Big_Worker why does the Fed want a recession? there’s a Kaleckian story — the Fed as whip hand against burgeoning labor power — but it looks like Jay Powell is having a hard time persuading markets and fellow FOMC members that interest rates should continue to rise. it disinflation becomes deflation, there’ll be lots of pressure to cut.
lots of recession predictions but i have a hard time wrapping my head around why. inflation seems to be a past problem, supply distortions due to war and pandemic are on the upswing (barring some awful escalation), Europe’s energy crunch has been milder than expected. so what’s the case for a recession or even unusually slow-growth 2023?
@stephenjudkins i haven’t watched it in decades, but i would take that as a bad omen.
@elbowspeak just so you know, i didn’t have you specifically in mind.
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eventually the bad consequences you continue to cause overwhelm your pretensions to good intentions.
does FAIT mean the Fed wants a prolonged period of subtarget inflation to bring down the average?
what if the government got hold of all of our tax information. can you imagine?
@sqrtminusone well, they just advanced a hypothesis as to its cause…
that whole genre, the dramatic earnest documentary full of ginned up testimony is a trip. god help you if the didactic tone persuades you you are being educated. it’s easy to see how kids might not fully understand they are being lied to. (lots of grown-ups don’t!)
@sqrtminusone ghosts invite lovely questions of definition. shrieking phantoms may not exist in horror-movie form, but there are other senses in which ghosts are everywhere around us. our memories, these devices, the scarred earth and the built environment, all of these are ectoplasm in which they thrive.
@stevej it was the obedient cyborgs who revealed vestigial humanity in their funerals that one of the protagonists almost was turned into that got to me.
i’ll pass on the dystopian fiction i prefer writing that takes some imagination.
at the shitsite they’re having a thread on what movie traumatized you as a child. for me, oddly, it was disney’s “the black hole”.
@ParaGauchial there are lots of not-great-things about a paradigm where monopoly is treated as an exceptional condition that FTC or courts must adjudicate. it's better to think about elasticities, make high elasticities (price elasticity of demand most obviously, but for many firm "price" is extracted in dimensions other than money) the goal. 1/
@ParaGauchial if a thing is a natural monopoly, in the sense that sustaining fragmentation is so costly in real terms that the benefits of competition don't overcome the costs of nonconsolidation (extremely high fixed costs per firm, or strong network effects, for example), that is an argument for public control. we tend to prefer public control externally + indirectly via regul8n. but i wonder if we shouldn't, for informational reasons, prefer internal control by municipaliz8n or nationaliz8n.