Fears about stagflation are mounting in the US. It’s every central banker’s worst nightmare

For the past few years, the US economy has been growing at a pace that seemed too good to be true.

its hilarious how detached the bourgeois are from everyone else

thankfully the yanks aren't about to do anything stupid like start an economic war with the world's manufacturing superpower

Fear not, I'm told the economy is doing quite well. Just don't ask the peasants.

Is stagflation the furry thing where a cartoon deer gets puffed up like a balloon? Cause, I get being scared of that, but it's actually totally harmless

stagflation is the fear of central banks under capitalism, because the central bank ostensibly has only one move: raise or lower interest rates.

they raise interest rates to contract credit and induce layoffs, to loosen the labor markets. they rarely admit this, and usually it's behind coded language. but jon stewart interviewed some fed reserve clown during the recent spiking of interest rates and got him to admit it, which was wild to see.

they lower interest rates when they believe labor is sufficiently punished and its time to let the capital formations borrow cheap again to hoover up all the depressed assets from the previous crisis and mark them back up at a profit to make the books look good. they never admit this.

stagflation is the structural problem of too many material crises stacking up on the workers and the lever doesn't do the thing they want anymore, instead the prices go up even with mass layoffs and tight credit markets. when this happened in the 70s, the directives of the Powell Memo / neoliberalism began in earnest. unions were gutted, democratically controlled assets like pensions and municipal funds were plundered, deregulation and offshoring exploded, war spending increased dramatically, welfare "reform", and the wealthy got a big payday.

the problem with stagflation happening today is that the low hanging fruit of 40 years ago is gone and not much meat is left on the bone, and it's already spoken for. the last big piece of the pie would be to privatize social security which has long been a project of neoliberals, but it is still generally recognized as a legislative third rail: touch it and die.

so, my guess is, they'll do it through the courts. can't wait to see the test tube case they fabricate for making social security violate my god given right to invest my talents of silver into crypto.

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riddle me this commies, if the return on capital is 6 percent in bond market and 3 percent in stock market (p/e on s&p 500), what would enterprising capital owner do?

Bankers can't do anything about stagflation because stagflation happens when the real economy is damaged. Bankers can't do anything about the recent problems in the energy industry or global shipping. And yet, instead of accepting this, they still try to control the levers of the economy. They would rather that workers loose (high unemployment) than capital (high inflation eroding purchasing power of assets). Even if that means that less goods are being produced (thus worsening the underlying problem)