Gas shortages, record inflation, Middle East violence.
Sure sounds like The Carter Presidency to me. Sources have come in with the economic data, and I’m not going to lie to you: it isn’t pretty.
Reports indicate that inflation has hit a 13 year high. This is amid all of our other problems of course—like the gas shortage and waning influence abroad.
Looks like pumping trillions of dollars into an economy and just mindlessly printing money has the same effect no matter what year it is.
That’s the thing about economics—the rules are timeless.
Take a look through these reports:
The Epoch Times came through with the facts:
U.S. consumer prices have soared above economists’ predictions and by the most in over a decade, as fiscal stimulus and booming demand pushed against supply constraints, potentially fueling market fears of a prolonged bout of higher inflation.
The year-over-year consumer price index (CPI) jumped by 4.2 percent in April after rising 2.6 percent in March, the Labor Department said in a release on Wednesday (pdf). This is the largest 12-month increase since September 2008, when the index rose by 4.9 percent.
Forecasts from economists polled by DailyFX, a financial market insights platform, expected the year-over-year inflation measure to come in at 3.6 percent, compared to the actual 13-year high.
On a monthly basis, the CPI inflation measure jumped 0.8 percent in April after rising 0.6 percent in March, while the so-called core CPI, which excludes the volatile food and energy components, soared by 0.9 percent. The surge in the core CPI is the largest monthly increase since April 1982.
Market Watch had more on the state of the economy:
Senior Federal Reserve officials, who are supposed to protect the U.S. from high inflation, insist the increase is temporary. They contend inflation will subside by next year once the pandemic fades, most people go back to work and the global economy is largely recovered.
Investors are less sure. U.S. interest rates have risen in the past six months on worries about inflation and they could go even higher.
What happened: Price for a broad swath of goods and services rose by record amounts in April: Used cars and trucks, tires, computers, televisions, furniture, toys, computers and airline fares, among other things.
The cost of some of these goods and services, such as plane tickets, fell sharply in the pandemic and are now recovering lost ground. Yet prices for other products like used vehicles are setting new all-time highs. Used-vehicle prices shot up 10% in April.
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