Pinflation II: the Millionaire machine
From an arcade in Stuart, Florida, the Millionaire pinball machine (1987) renamed “Billionaire”:
Related:
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Professor Krugman’s Nobel-grade thinking about inflation
Six months ago, the New York Times’s in-house Nobel-winning economist wrote “Wonking Out: I’m Still on Team Transitory” (9/10/2021):
if we finally get this pandemic under control, the inflation of 2021 will soon fade from memory.
Professor Krugman was correct about Joe Biden getting the pandemic until control. When the Science-rejecting Donald Trump was in the White House 350,000 Americans died with/from COVID-19 in 2020. Due to President Biden’s leadership and the vaccines that He developed, we’re on track to suffer only roughly a third of a million deaths in 2022.
Professor Krugman also seems to have been correct in predicting “the inflation of 2021 will soon fade from memory”, but maybe that is because the inflation of 2022 has been so much more dramatic?
The Nobel laurate is back this week with “How High Inflation Will Come Down”. He starts by doing what my former hedge fund manager friend says nearly all analysts do, i.e., extrapolating from recent events:
Rising prices will get worse before they get better.
Something new for an American journalist or politician… He blames Russia:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the prices of oil, wheat and other commodities to soar.
This time it is different:
Forty years ago, as many economists will tell you, inflation was “entrenched” in the economy. That is, businesses, workers and consumers were making decisions based on the belief that high inflation would continue for many years to come.
Things are very different now. Back then almost everyone expected persistent high inflation; now few people do. Bond markets expect inflation eventually to return to prepandemic levels. While consumers expect high inflation over the next year, their longer-term expectations remain “anchored” at fairly moderate levels. Professional forecasters expect inflation to moderate next year.
If the professional forecasters are good at their jobs, why aren’t they absurdly rich via trading on their own previous forecasts and, thus, retired from forecasting?
Nobel-grade thinking… Prices will go down as soon as prices go down:
A lot of recent inflation will subside when oil and food prices stop rising, when the prices of used cars, which rose 41 percent (!) over the past year during the shortage of new cars, come down, and so on. The big surge in rents also appears to be largely behind us, although the slowdown won’t show up in official numbers for a while. So it probably won’t be necessary to put the economy through an ’80s-style wringer to get inflation down.
Professor Krugman agrees with what Chauncey Gardiner pointed out, i.e., that there will be growth in the spring:
The inflation of 2021-22 looks very different, and much easier to solve, from the inflation of 1979-80.
What if it takes a few springs for inflation to subside?
Related:
- “Zimbabwe’s trillion-dollar note: from worthless paper to hot investment” (The Guardian, 2016): “When the Zimbabwean dollar first came into existence in 1980 it had a similar value to the US dollar … The central bank of Zimbabwe issued $100,000,000,000,000 notes during the last days of hyperinflation in 2009, and they barely paid for a loaf of bread.”
Porn for Californians
From Lost River Road in Stuart, Florida:
(the “lost river” runs right along Interstate 95 and features a Marriott as well as a Cracker Barrel)
The $4.20 price for gasoline is actually not the lowest that we’ve recently seen in Florida. One station had it for $3.98. By contrast, the Google shows that the Chevron gas station where I used to fill up near HP Labs in Palo Alto is at $6.16.
Related:
- “Average Price of Gas in LA County Inches Toward $6 a Gallon” (NBC)
- “National gas prices continue to drop while California prices still on the rise” (Mercury News)
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Is $1,000 the new $500 for airfare?
Friends and family trying to visit us here in the Florida Free State are finding that airfares are usually over $1,000 if the luxury of lugging a bag on board and picking a seat is desired. Before coronapanic, the standard price was around $500. Is $1,000 the new $500? Or is Florida a special case of high airfares? (Unclear why it should be; there are a tremendous number of airports capable of handling commercial flights and it is reasonably easy to drive to an alternate airport.)
A discount airline on final approach in Juno Beach:
Related:
- “Are EU Markets More Competitive than Those in the US?” (NBER): Industries that experienced significant increases in concentration in the United States, such as telecom and airlines, did not experience parallel changes in the EU.
- “Why Airfares in Europe Are Lower Than in the U.S.” (The Globalist; 2010): The total average fare per mile in the United States for the above five flights was 23 cents per mile, while in Europe it was 11 cents. Remove the taxes and fees and Europe’s cut-rate airfare advantage is even clearer: The base fare per mile in the United States for the five return flights is 19 cents, while in Europe it is just six cents per mile — one-third of the U.S. cost.
- “Europe Shows Us Real Airline Competition” (2015): The largest European carrier has only 13% of the market, and the top four airlines have 39% of the market. But in the US, the largest carrier – newly merged AA/US – has a 25% market share, and the top four airlines have taken 83% of the market. Another clue to the vibrancy of the two regions is that in the EU, after the top nine airlines share 64% of the market, that still leaves a huge 36% chunk for all the many other carriers. But in the US, the top nine airlines leave only 3.4% for the few remaining US airlines. Indeed, the very idea of ‘top nine’ airlines in the US is sadly a rather ridiculous concept. As you can see in the chart, by the time you start to get past the top six, the remaining airlines are struggling to get as much as 2% market shares.