Today’s PPI report came in hot. More on that in a moment.
For now enjoy reading these selected categories/subcategories from the CPI report earlier this week.
1 Like
As for this morning’s HOT PPI report,
It’s “hot” (no two-ways about that) but this is largely a repeat of the CPI news from earlier this week.
Consumers (on the CPI) got big breaks on gasoline prices and use car prices, both a relatively small components of PPI.
From Foxbusiness News:
Inflation at the wholesale level rose much more than expected in January, underscoring the challenge of taming price pressures within the economy.
The Labor Department said Friday that its producer price index, which measures inflation at the wholesale level before it reaches consumers, jumped 0.3% in January from the previous month. On an annual basis, prices remain up 0.9%.
Those figures are both higher than the 0.1% monthly gain and the 0.6% annual figure predicted by Refinitiv economists.
In another sign that points to the stickiness of high inflation, core prices — which exclude the more volatile measurements of food and energy — surged 0.5% for the month. That is higher than both the 0.1% estimate and the flat reading recorded last month. . . .
“Transitory”
2 Likes
Good job, libs. 
2 Likes
And an extra good job joe.
30 year mortgage rate up to 6.77%
Yay! Destroy that economy lefties. (Sarcasm)
who wants to be a Mylar balloon?
I was reading this and I thought you might find it an interesting read:
“It has to happen. If it doesn’t … we’re going to have tremendous inflation here in the United States,” Bernstein said to CNBC on Monday. “We’re dependent on the world for everything at a time when globalization is starting to contract. Not a good combination. It changes the story from secular disinflation to secular inflation.”
Market commentators have warned that deglobalization could be a major factor keeping inflation elevated for years to come. Billionaire investor Ken Griffin predicted last year that high prices could stick around for decades as fragmented world trade will disrupt supply chains and push up costs for consumers.
Reindustrialization efforts in the US are already underway, with the government offering billions in aid for companies to build new infrastructure and produce key goods, like semiconductors, EVs, and solar panels. More firms are already choosing to manufacture their goods in America, a JPMorgan paper found.
Bernstein has been calling for a reindustrialization of the US economy over the past decade. In 2012, he published a whitepaper calling for an “industrial renaissance,” which would take US manufacturing back to levels recorded in the 50s and 60s. That renaissance will be the predominant theme in the market over the next 10 years, he said in a note earlier this year.
Personally, I don’t agree that this would be effective. Exactly how much more government spending would be required to bring all this manufacturing back? Where would these factories go? How much are they going to pay the workers to produce the goods for less?
Haha forgot about that word 
The dollar, in relation to foreign labor costs converted into dollars for measurement, is the driving factor for where manufacturing is located. When the labor to build a foreign located plant costs a fraction of what that same work costs in the US, the plant is going to be built overseas. When a good daily wage in a foreign location is a fraction of the wage required to get that work done in the US, the plant is going to be built where that lower cost labor pool can do the work. All the government incentives and borrowing in the world isn’t going to change this.
1 Like
That’s a good article, setting the inflation theme aside (for now) it focuses on the “re-industrialization of America.”
I have zero doubt the US has over the years adopted many anti-industrial polices.
We should undo most of them, and if we do, America will re-industrialize.
This however is very very different from what we are doing.
It is very different from
That is a bad thing. Not a good thing.
Americans generally, and we cons in particular, should remember that when Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, he was not decrying a welfare state, nor excessive labor advocacy, nor excessive environmentalism etc… None of those things existed when he wrote it (in 1776 btw.)
The system he was opposing was one he called “mercantilism,” in which government policy was designed to create manufacturing jobs. The English government (and the nobility) felt that
- making furniture is always better than chopping the wood to make it,
- making steel products is always better than digging coal and iron ore
- etc.
and to a degree they were correct. Where they were incorrect was in deciding
- “Therefore England is better off if we have the craftsmen and they have the cola miners,”
and - “The government should adopt policies to make it so.”
That’s wrong on both counts.
.
.
.
If we undo our mistakes. manufacturing jobs will return.
If we empower central planners to intervene in the economy and subsidies certain jobs and industries, (via "public private partnerships etc.) then we will only compound the problem and create mor dependency on it.
1 Like
