Armchair financiers on HN are always full of energy. Considering what we were threatened with at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (total economic meltdown), 7.5% inflation is downright relaxing.
COVID didn't cause inflation. Helicopter money did. My liquid net worth almost doubled in the middle of a crisis and my inflation hedge (my house) is worth twice what I bought it for.
The average blue collar person doesn't have the benefits we do and can't play the game. 7.5% "inflation" (if you want to call CPI that) is panic inducing for basically anyone else.
I've taken the amount of cash held in my savings account down to very little and am pushing my usual savings budget into stocks, silver, and crypto. Holding USD seems.... ill-advised.
It would be easier to dismiss online commenters as "armchair" if the experts at the wheel, with all the data, the models, and the PhDs at their command, were making more accurate predictions than them.
I think that consensus is very fractured, but setting that aside -- has the "it's transitory" consensus made any concrete predictions? Have they been holding up so far?
I just look at housing prices as the input to a low pass filter with a 10-year pole, whose output is shelter costs, and I see the input is up tens of percent and the output is up 4ish percent, and that is enough to tell me we'll have a major inflation driver for ten years. Larry Summers says the same thing, so I'm pretty confident in my own predictions.
COVID didn't cause inflation. Helicopter money did. My liquid net worth almost doubled in the middle of a crisis and my inflation hedge (my house) is worth twice what I bought it for.
The average blue collar person doesn't have the benefits we do and can't play the game. 7.5% "inflation" (if you want to call CPI that) is panic inducing for basically anyone else.