Inflation: The Devil We Thought We Knew

I published this post first on JuST THINK. To stay up to date, come to https://justthink.substack.com/ and subscribe for free! For the past three years, China and Covid have been inextricably linked. The China-Covid nexus played a critical role in the global pandemic response, the global economic recovery and China’s…

I published this post first on JuST THINK. To stay up to date, come to https://justthink.substack.com/ and subscribe for free! The second largest crypto exchange, FTX, blew up and went bankrupt. Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) has seen its market value collapse. The giants that drove the latest…

I published this post first on JuST THINK. To stay up to date, come tohttps://justthink.substack.com/ and subscribe for free! In case you’d forgotten, we are all going to die. Not in the obvious sense that each and everyone of us will eventually succumb to our mortal nature (after all, Silicon…

I published this post first on JuST THINK. To stay up to date, come to https://justthink.substack.com/ and subscribe for free! Two issues grabbed my attention this week . Both are close to my heart, they are interrelated, and they have major economic implications. Covid amnesty or Nuremberg trial? The Atlantic published a provocatively titled essay…

I published this post first on JuST THINK. To stay up to date, come to https://justthink.substack.com/ and subscribe for free! The same Federal Reserve (Fed) that used to say, “we only fear deflation, we know how to fight inflation,” now says “we only fear inflation, we know how to fight…

The IMF’s Annual Meetings have delivered the customary dose of doom and gloom. The latest World Economic Outlook warns that “Risks to the outlook remain unusually large and to the downside.” After a long detailed list of things that could go badly wrong it reiterates, in case you missed the…

At their annual symposium in Jackson Hole, central bankers professed full commitment to fighting inflation, while lamenting that the world has become a much more difficult place for monetary policymaking. There was virtually no critical assessment of how the macroeconomic policies of the past decade contributed to the current problems…

I find it kind of funny how “zero inflation” has come to be hailed as a blessing; not that long ago it was feared as the brink of deflation, that terrifying economic bogeyman. Don’t get me wrong: it was a relief to see July consumer prices unchanged from June, with…

July’s jobs data came in better than expected, and stock sold off. From the markets’ perspective, if a company performs better than expected, it’s good news, but if the economy as a whole does, it’s bad news. Fallacy of composition. The financial press has a logical explanation: stronger jobs data…