[MrRiddle]

How can you have inflation while most of the services and commodities people are using are not increasing in price? Sure, you have equities rising, but that’s about it. Inflation because call options are flooding the market? Bonds are going down, real estate market is stagnant.

[dayofthedaleks]

Inflation in consumer goods appears in insidious ways, such as shrinking portions in grocery items, decreasing quality of materials, and crapification of services.

[snomad]

A McDonalds double cheeseburger meal costs $8.

I remember when that was 3.99 not too long ago. Somehow I doubt that price difference is captured by the official 1 - 2% inflation rate.

[throw0101a]

> Somehow I doubt that price difference is captured by the official 1 - 2% inflation rate.

It was captured. It's just that food, and specifically restaurants is only one component of CPI. In Canada it makes up 5% of the basket of goods ("Food" makes up 17%):

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/2018016/cpi-ipc...

You are probably 'suffering' from familiarity bias:

* https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/08/familiarity-bias-investing...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familiarity_heuristic

[dragonwriter]

> A McDonalds double cheeseburger meal costs $8.

> I remember when that was 3.99 not too long ago. Somehow I doubt that price difference is captured by the official 1 - 2% inflation rate.

Probably not exactly (and maybe not even approximately), because while restaurant meals are included in the CPI, the CPI is a somewhat broader index than the “McDonald’s double cheeseburger meal index” (also, McDonald's prices have regional and even store-to-store variation, and it's possible your local prices have varied differently than average for that particular item.)

[manquer]

There certainly is a big Mac index.

The price of big Mac is used as purchasing power proxy.

McDonald's is pretty efficient in their supply chains to use as rough proxy to real world idea of how things are. The variations you talk about don't add up to 100% change in price OP mentions.

[fastaguy88]

Prices vary. While the price of a McD's meal may have doubled over some period of time (or space -- compare your neighborhood McD vs the one at OHare airport), MIT's billion prices project shows pretty conclusively that prices on average have been going up very slowly (< 2%/year) since the 2008 Great Recession.

[mamon]

Commodities prices might not be increasing right now, but that's not the point. The point is, Jeff Bezos's wealth is approaching $200B, Elon Musk is not far behind. Quantitive Easing and similar policies seem to be designed to increase wealth inequality - one more decade of such policy, one more big crisis, and all wealth will be concentrated in the hands of 0.01% richest men. Meanwhile middle class businesses are being drawn to banktruptcy by COVID-related lockdowns. We are slipping back in feudalism - soon most people will be at mercy of government, and small elite of billionaires.

[trident5000]

Wages are stagnant which means they dont need to raise the price of goods on the other side, theres your uptick in inflation.

[jonas21]

I don't get it. If wages are stagnant and prices are stagnant, isn't that by definition zero inflation?

[AmericanChopper]

You have to do quite a bit of statistical gymnastics to come to the conclusion that wages are stagnant. Wages are almost always increasing. The stagnation observations come up when you account for inflation (a statistic called real wages). Until recently, real wages had peaked in 1973, so if you only had two points of data, February 1973 and March 2019, they would make a perfectly flat line on a graph. That’s where you get your “stagnation”. In reality, they steadily trended downwards between the early 70s and mid 90s, and have since then been steadily trending upwards between the mid 90s and today. I’m sure COVID is going to confound this to a non-trivial extent, but in 2019 they were at the highest level recorded.

[trident5000]

Prices are not stagnant. You can see that quite clearly from the average price of a big mac over the years.