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I thought the ruling class wants higher unemployment, as a "worker discipline device."
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/24/unemployment-inflation-janet-yellen/
It's one of the core contradictions. Keeping the rates high is a way to build out a reserve army of labour, but it's also destroying the consumer market which underpins the whole system.
But economists often point to a reason the Fed is tiptoeing rather than running toward rate cuts: The central bank was slow to react when inflation shot up in 2021, something it has faced widespread criticism for, and then was overly optimistic when price pressures began to cool last year. Officials have been wary of another head fake.
Not a single word typed in this article about the actual primary cause of inflation, trade disruptions in industrial inputs (gas being a big one) or Argriculture (wheat and such, because of the Ukraine war).
My impression was that a lot of the current inflation was simply driven by companies raising prices in order to increase profits. For the US at least, disruptions in Russian and Ukranian energy and food production have only a very small effect.
The reason American companies can jack up prices is largely due to prices being high in international markets. These prices have become high due to the disruptive effects of covid, rising protectionism and the ongoing wars.
Federal Reserve officials held off on cutting interest rates this week because they want slightly more data to feel confident that inflation is truly coming under control.
Is this is a joke?
When it costs more to borrow to buy a house or expand a business, people make fewer big purchases and companies hire fewer workers.
Where are the line go up libs to complain about this?
Fed officials stood ready to react if they saw evidence that the job market was taking a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse.
Why, so they can celebrate as soon as they confirm that they successfully (along with the biden admin) killed all the labor momentum from 2020?
“A broad set of indicators suggests that conditions in the labor market have returned to about where they stood on the eve of the pandemic,” Mr. Powell said during a news conference this week. He later added that “I would not like to see material further cooling in the labor market.”
Amazing to read this statement as soon as I typed my previous remark. These fuckers admit everything openly.