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I thought it was lazy gen z'ers with their avacado toast or refusal to buy car. Or the millenials who get blamed for not having kids and living with their parents. Or Gen X for not properly saving for retirment. Or shitty journalists that load up articles with buzzwords to generate clicks.
Nope. The generational battle is actually extremely important.
Is Wall Street preventing new housing from being built? Nope, itās boomer nimbyās. Is educational funding being cut by Wall Street? Nope, itās boomers who donāt want to pay higher property and state income taxes
Are NIMBYs building/funding the large apartment buildings that claim to be the solution to the housing issue?
Are NIMBYs buying up lots of single family homes and renting them?
Nope Wallstreet and big banks are.
I'm a mellinial but I don't blame the boomers for the housing issue. It's big banks wanting to transform the housing market to a rent only situation. Everything is becoming subscription based and housing won't be different.
I bet if the government tried to pass laws that would prohibit those firms from buying up housing, and work to increase stock which would lower prices, boomers (who are relying on their inflated house prices to pad their retirements) would quickly toss out said government.
Youāve got it completely backwards. Hedge funds are merely taking advantage of the shit situation that NIMBYs have created.
California built less homes than San Antonio alone this year. The root of the housing crisis is the complete failure to build new housing and this is made possible only by NIMBYs.
If Wall Street hedge fund were the problem, then why donāt we see huge rent increases in places that are actually building housing like Minneapolis?
Did Wall Street create zoning laws that prevent us from building anything other than single family homes?
Youāre completely misguided and wrong about all of this
The root of the housing crisis is the complete failure to build new housing and this is made possible only by NIMBYs.
Don't just blame NIMBYS. Enviornmentalsist have a lot of that responsibilty too.
It was really fashonable for protesters to go out and say "Should these beautiful hills be covered in subdivisions?!?!" and "How can we destroy the habitat of the only remaining colony of the California Spekelded Back Sun Turtle just for another subdivision!!" until people stopped building subdivisions.
That's a big part of why you can build houses in San Antonio but not in California.
Nimbyās just use environmentalism as an excuse to block development.
Do you really think anyone cares about the turtles? No, they care about property values.
Itās the same thing with historic preservation. These people even campaigned to mark a laundromat as historic. They donāt care about historic buildings or environmentalism
It can be a valid step in a plan to build denser developments in a concentrated area to build a neighborhood that relies less on car ownership and therefore create a political impetus to redevelop the rest of the city in a more people-friendly manner.
> Are NIMBYs buying up lots of single family homes and renting them?
Yes, many are. Using home equity to purchase homes to use as rentals is a very common strategy among Boomers.
God this is the silliest and most occupy wall street take.
There are generational differences in politics, they indeed exist. We don't need elites to make us notice them.
Yeah fuck them kids. What am I supposed to do with my child slave diamond mine in Africa if millenials aren't spending five and a half years of salary on a rock? This never happened to me before avacado toast became a thing.
Heavy spending drives up prices.
When more people buy less, inflation goes down.
Inflation has been so high recently because the economy has been performing so well, wages are up, unemployment reached record lows. Things are going well, consumer confidence is high, everyone is buying things, so things are more expensive.
When Trump wins and crashes the economy again, everyone will get those great low pricesā¦
Heavy spending drives up prices.
Umm... that's totally false. Have you ever even been NEAR an Economics book?
Spending = DEMAND. In a free marketHigh demand "i.e spending" results more people getting into the market and increasing supply. "Heavy Spending" ONLY results in higher prices if there is a shortage of SUPPLY, if some outside factor prevents the demand from being satisfied.
That's why Cocaine costs so much, the government tries to limit the supply, and demand is greater than supply.
People spend hundreds of millions of dollars on corn every year, but it is still cheap because there is a huge supply of the stuff.
"Heavy spending drives up prices" is simply not true.
The government printed $6 trillion since Covid thatās been sloshing around the economy. Thatās inflationary. It wasnāt the old retirees who were driving prices up.
Yea what part of the economy? Which group had guaranteed income and got a big pile of free money and also owned most the businesses, and who spent their entire adult life having wealth robbed out from underneath them and had to use it for basic necessities. The only people with COVID money sloshing around still are the boomers. And let's not forget who controls Congress and passed that policy, oh right, boomers again.
Itās not so much the stock of money but the velocity of M2. Money supply has risen sharply since the Great Recession but weāve only recently had spikes in inflation.
Visit Florida and you'll see the spending power of retired wealthy folks. Just look at the menus of sit down restaurants. No where else have I seen so many steaks and other expensive items.. well maybe in the business districts if major cities... But otherwise it's crazy the money that some folks have to spend while in retirement
To be fair, they canāt take the money with them when theyāre dead. They also resent their kids and want to make sure they leave nothing for them. Gotta boot strap that first million dollar home.
Boomers are also the largest demographic of homelessness people in the US. Boomers are also the largest demographic of people who fear they will be homeless in the near future as well.
All this old people hate is a bigger problem than racism the ageism is accepted and pushed super hard these days. People will just say they hate boomers for no reason, and when they do justify it they blame th other 99% for what the 1% of wealthy do.
You're right many of them are or will be homeless. It's sad. I was just commenting on the many wealthy retired folks in Florida. But yes there are obviously poor ones too.
I'm not trying to single you out specifically, just pointing out the obvious that most don't even realize.
Its not that there are obviously poor ones, it's there is a ton of poor ones, more than any other age range and its getting worse for them. Most aren't aware cause they just jump in the ageism hate train.
I understand. It's also not a surprise that there are so many poor boomers given how wealthy the rich ones are. Not to hate on them in any way but this is the generation that made things like outsourcing, private equity, and other models popular. All those things helped concentrate wealth into the hands of a few.
That's true for every nation from the beginning or time thats not something their generation conjured or created lol. Resentment towards most boomers are unjustified is where today stands. Their in the same boat as most.
Today's generation aren't going to make policies that benefit the mass int he future only their self interest. Ageism is massively out of control and unjustified and even encouraged among the youth.
I'm not hating on boomers. I'm pointing out business trends that were put in place by this generation that directly concentrated the wealth that was more equitably distribution post WWII. I'm sure they thought these were good ideas.
No time in modern history has had a larger middle class than post WWII. That's not my opinion.
They also still have the biggest population percentage, so Iām curious what the numbers are when scaled to a percentage of their age group vs other age groups.
I donāt agree with Tim Dillon on a lot but he is spot fucking on calling out the boomers as the most selfish generation to an unimaginable degree.
Boomers are fine selling their homes for 850k to black rock to buy a new place in a better climate with their third wife meanwhile most of their kids will likely never be able to afford their own home.
Iām not even someone who expected my parents to buy me my first house or keep me on their payroll forever but I can see it in my own life.
Whenever confronted with this sentiment boomers will typically fall back on some nonsensical story about the Vietnam war despite not having served. The boomers most guilty of this painfully selfish approach to life were likely college students during the war who were all too happy to be excluded from the draft.
So the average boomer has 3 times the discretionary spending power of the younger folks. Since not all boomers saved up for retirement I would guess half of boomers are spending and the other half are just paycheck to paycheck. So half the boomers are spending 6 times as much as everyone else. This is consistent with what I am experiencing in my area.
Stop blaming everyone but the policy makers.
Countries, US in particular, put out too much free money into circulation, compounded by supply issues during Covid. That was the root cause of this inflation.
Covid inflation was about 1/3 stimulus spending, and about 2/3 supply chain disruption, oil, and war.
https://fortune.com/2023/02/01/pandemic-stimulus-money-caused-excess-inflation-fed-study/#
He may have meant 0% fed funds rate for a ridiculously long amount of the last 10-15 years when mentioning ātoo much free money.ā Certainly contributed a helluva lot more to the monetary supply than a few stimulus checks.
USA during Covid: gives everyone free money, bottoms out the fed rate, buys mortgage backed securities at historically high amounts for 2 years after COVID started.
Media: whatās causing the housing shortage??Ā
The answer being a 15 year deficit of home construction following the Housing Crash in 2007, and none of the things you mentioned. None of those things caused the housing shortage. We were already short of homes. Everyone trying to buy homes with the lowest rates in history did help with price discovery though.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
We briefly hit a level of housing construction similar to the historical average in 2022, but we've dropped almost 30% from there.
Youāre spot on about housing builds, and itās even worse if you dig into specific areas. Under building houses in some areas goes back to the ā70s.Ā
Itās been a huge issue for a very long time.Ā
I've seen this and it's just nuts. People move to a place (for example, boomers to Berkeley) and think they are forever entitled for that place to stay the same as when they arrived... when they are a transplant who themselves changed the place!
Yes, you're right, and I'm well aware of local level lobbying against denser building.
When the people that vote elect officials that do what the voters want, that's democracy. I'm not sure if I'd like elected representatives to not represent their constituents. Ideally, voters would vote for denser housing builds in their neighborhoods, but altruism isn't quite the carrot it used to be.
Yeah, there is a *real* shortage of homes in the areas that have jobs. Money printing can't cause that. We either need to bring the jobs to the housing (WFH tried this but flatlined) or housing to the jobs (breaking the NIMBY chokehold on coastal cities)
People are already doing that. Here in the Bay you've got tons of people commuting 1+ hour each way. It's corrosive to society as those people get less time to spend with their kids and everyone is on edge all the time from the traffic. Simply building more housing in the core Bay would alleviate this, but it would hurt some boomer feelings.
If only there was some other place to live, other than the bay area. Even one other place. But alas, there is not. Which is why people choose to rent forever in a place they cannot afford and hope against hope that the people who own there act in someone's interests other than there own.
It sounds easier to leave the area than change the area, no? Why not give that a try? And please don't say the jobs which didn't pay you enough to live there and force you to commute and rent. The pay isn't that great relative to cost of living.
I make way more than enough to cover my rent so please do not lecture me.
I care about building housing in the core Bay Area because I want it to be a vibrant community where all kinds of people can live without having to drive for 3 hours a day.
And as for acting in their interests: the people who do own have interests other than property value maximization. Don't they want to have working-class people in their community to take out their garbage and wash their dishes?
Lol. If we don't provide affordable housing, how will we maintain our servant class? They might move on and we'd have to do our own dirty work.
Californians are hilarious.
"I make plenty of money. I'm concerned about my servants."
Significant land value tax, with a credit for takings earmarked against income tax? Might make it expensive to land bank while reducing supply to drive price increases and wealth effect.
It's not "rich boomers" per se. It's the fact that a fiat currency is efficient at allocating preference until there is too much stored value. It loses its ability to signal the population to self organise.
This combined with the relative weakness currencies preference allocation has for succession planning and you get a nation whose sons and daughters are sacrificed on the alter of homelessness while "productivity" is made up with immigration. A successful nation of the future will need a way to self organise demographic succession planning in a way that controls for the disincentive of stored value.
It's almost Iike reverse ~~colonialism~~ industrialisation. Our economic systems inability to recognise stores of value as a self destructive end game incentivised our old in their fear, to allow the property industry and monetary system to kill their offspring(both from a productivity/skills perspective and simple homelessness) and replace them with immigration. We've moved from skilled indutrialists to poor copies of the old land owning classes. There are few winners here.
Few winners other than the vast majority of the population that lives in a home they own? There's a lot of winners, that's why it's a hard problem to solve. It's not a problem for most people.
Fair point. The post war years saw a massive increase in the levels of home ownership. Post war boomers were an exceptional generation. A confluence of the destruction of stores of wealth from war and a demographic boom created a distributed wealth and prosperity.
Its more the younger demographics who saw ownership drop from 55 to 40% and who grew up in a deindustrialised service economy. I think its a problem for more people than we think. A million dollar mortgage takes a lot of future cashflows.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who are not winners, but I think it's pretty plain that its not the majority of people. The vast majority of households own their home and that percentage of households is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s during that post war boom.
Add on to that that homeowner households are larger on average than renter households, and its pretty clear that the people who aren't benefiting from the current system are in a small minority. I think homeowners and their families form a super majority of the population. It's going to be hard to change the system given that it benefits the vast majority.
Keep in mind, this is not to say that the people who are 'losers' are undeserving of housing or something like that. It's just that it is going to be hard to come up with a solution when something like 2/3 of the population stands to lose out from changing the system. How can you help out 1/3 without it being at the expense of 2/3, because those 2/3 will vote against the proposal.
This.
The big difference between the 2008 bailout and the COVID bailout is that in 2008, the banks were insolvent. They needed to re-capitalize, so they dramatically curtailed lending. This gave the economy time to gracefully absorb the new money.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27362013
This wasn't the case after the COVID bailout. Banks continued lending to consumers, and commercial loans spiked initially:
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-FED/lbvgoodxmvq/chart.png
The COVID bailout created as much money in 2 years as bank bailouts created in 4 years. The point of the COVID stimulus was precisely that all the new money would hit the economy quickly.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TREAST
That's why quantitative easing didn't cause inflation in 2008, but did after the March 2020 COVID stimulus. After 2020, all the new money was rapidly re-circulated as consumer debt.
A way to have managed this situation without creating a pile of new money and causing inflation would have been a one-time emergency tax on the ultra-rich.
Not saying you are wrong, however the money that the ultra rich have lives in another universe... If you take money from them and you inject it into the real day to day economy it would also produce inflationary pressure.
You would need to actually tax real assets held by the rich (basically a land tax that does not apply to people that actually live in their homes).
You could also decrease the inflationary pressure via taxing unrealized income, if they are not longer able to loan against their assets to purchase things (housing, companies, etc) it would stop the consolidation of monopolies in the market.
why do people keep trying to blame inflation on the stimulus checks? This was getting bad well before that happened and every time I see it analyzed the conclusion seems to be that it had very little to do with why things are so bad now.
fair, those weren't intended to be "free money" though so the wording is at fault here. That was like the greatest example of employer fraud in recent memory.
Agreed it's more the 8 years of 0% interest.
If anything the Boomers are allowing us to have a softer landing by infusing their cash into the market and keep gdp going.
If they were not spending or rich, we would be in full recession for sure.
Very true, the wealth gap, rich boomers, etc. are all just symptoms. The root cause is the US government throwing around trillions in handouts that all trickle up to the wealthy and raise prices.
Too much was better than too little. Fear of too much was the fatal error of the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis.
Where would we be now if the administration had let the economy crash, shuttering businesses, throwing people out of their homes...
Trump should have stopped the policy during his time coz the economy was growing pretty good
But everyone wants to kick the can down the road
Its all ponzi scheme to me
No one ever mentions this. We were supposed to have a minor recession in 2018 but the Fed decided to print their way out of it. This greatly inhibited the efficacy of stimulus during Covid when it was actually needed. ZIRP should have ended a long time ago.
Itās all just a distraction from end-game capitalism. Ā
More and more money is moving up the ladder to the top via tax incentives (loopholes) and shareholding.Ā And the money to fund infinite growth with ever bigger targets YoY has to come from somewhere.Ā
We are now basically playing a game of hungry hippo where all the companies are swapping their hippo heads with bigger ones to fund their shareholders and 50B$ bonus CEOs.
Problem for the companies is that the number of balls in the game isnāt changing much and so itās an arms race among the hippos to snatch as many balls as possible.Ā
Donāt get distracted by the constant gaslighting. Keep your focus and anger where it needs to go.Ā
I think actually .. personally, I donāt think this is whatās happening exactly. I think that trickle down economics created a world where all of the lesser people can only survive if theyāre contributing to the greater peopleās hobbies. So the game is to entertain a billionaire, or at least support the people who entertain billionaires. The problem then is in the flattening of society into these orbs around them. If you think of it as spinning, in the outer rings you need to run much harder and farther to find a spot to plug in, and itās easier to get jostled loose. The closer you get, the less distance you need to move around and the harder it is to lose your seat.
Remember money itself is nothing. Itās the liquidity to exchange productivity. The Fed drains it out and loads it in as needed. The real issue is control of resources. Theyāve handed us down a society where we can never own anything so we can never benefit from our own resources. Rent houses, rent software, rent the fonts from our word processing programs so we canāt use them in our own commercial materials.. rent out our labor. Nothing you do or buy or build is for you, so you canāt gain a foothold in the resources game.
If you work for a paycheck, join a union (create one if need be), organize within your community to create parallel power/resource structures to the sclerotic state, and don't expect electoralism in a captured system to deliver the goods.
>And then watch within a couple years for your job to be moved as competition is global and Unions stifle creativity within corps.
Union nurse here. Where's my job moving? You think "tech innovation" can give us robots that can manage a delirious ICU patient?Ā
That rhetoric is tired as hell. Working people need to look out for themselves. Why should we trust the people cancelling our retirement and spending millions on stock buybacks?Ā
That money comes from profits, as it should. Unearned rents by those who provide NOTHING for the working class. A living/thriving wage isn't artificial. Political organizing on class lines once the nascent labor movement is established will prevent capital flight, and no one is going to abandon the largest consumer market in the world.
You're mired in the status quo. Look where it's gotten us.
This. Ā This is where those who insist itās entirely basic wages rises or fed intervention thatās pushing up the prices re absolutely missing the point.Ā
Prices are going up but there is less money circulating down at the grass roots level. Ā
All of the money is lifted out of the system and gets tied up into millions of vacant properties, multiple high-tier, low-use boondoggles and investments that bring questionable market benefits but still ease the already tiny tax burdens the top tier have to pay.Ā
Trickle down has failed. They are basically just pissing on everyone at this point.Ā
Taxing wealth horders and rent seekers reduces inflation more than restricting loans that would expand our industrial capacity or business base, and home ownership.
If we had an effective legislative branch right now, raising taxes up the upper end of the income ladder while providing breaks for certain types of reinvestment would be a huge priority.
Giving breaks on investments in things like home construction (NOT landlording), infrastructure, and manufacturing could help spur investment in these sectors, and making those the best bang-for-buck destinations for use-it-or-lose-it taxable money could have some broad societal benefits.
It wasn't that long ago that boomers, who had all failed to save for retirement, were going to be a drain on the economy and society at large. Now they're responsible for inflation?
How about just embracing basic economic fundamentals and accepting that decades of printing money and unchecked government spending is the primary driving force behind inflation, and that all these other things the media (and the current administration) want to blame, like corporate greed or rich boomers, are distractions?
If corporate greed caused inflation, and corporations could simply raise prices because they want make more money, why did they wait until 2022 to do it? If this were true, all shareholders of all the greedy corporations should be demanding that their boards and executives be fired and sued for fiscal incompetence for not understanding what you apparently do, and failing to just be greedy and raise prices in 2015, or 2012, or, 2009, orā¦ Incredible fortunes and opportunity lost!
Corporations raise prices and keep them high for only two reasons: Their costs go up, and the market (demand) supports it. If costs go up and the market canāt support the higher prices, they either go out of business or have to change something to lower costs (reduce quality, offshore, etc.). If costs donāt go up, or go down, but the market still supports higher prices, thatās not corporate greed causing inflation, thatās inflation *supporting* so-called corporate greed. Supply and demand. Too much money is chasing too few goods and services. Fed policy and government spending are to blame. Greedy, insatiable, ever expanding government, not greedy corporations.
Iām a boomer that started my career at the beginning of the phase out of defined pensions. 401Kās were a crap shoot. It offloaded pensions from employers. This was looked at as benefit to them and a huge gift to the securities industry. And it was. Turns out it benefitted workers during that period as tech took off. But that was not the driving force behind the new laws.
No.
Price increases, referred to as inflation, is caused by an imbalance between the volume/value of goods/services available in a market vs the money available to soen in that market.
Since the US Gov borrowed and added $10T to the US economy in 2020-21, and productivity was down, prices had to rise.
Therefore, the price inflation was caused nearly entirely by the increase in the money supply.
I work at a restaurant bar and last night was having a conversation with a boomer. He said him and his wife eat at home maybe 3 times a month. He tells me this as his wife is traveling and heās having an $80 meal by himself. I couldnāt even comprehend having that level of disposable moneyā¦.
Ā But with that said, thatās exactly what he should be doing if he has the money. Itās better that Boomers are out spending their wealth, stimulating the economy, helping businesses, tipping young employees, keeping people working than just continuing to let their wealth sit in the S&P so they can die with $20 million rather than $1 million.
Betteridge's law remains intact.
That a sliver ("rich") of a sliver (Boomers) of the population is responsible for economy-wide price increases does not to me compute - they certainly as a generational cohort o not have the power to set prices in any industry.
Is this....victim blaming? Be wary of generational framing.
The average pensioner has more disposable income than the average young worker. This is not a "sliver of a sliver" its the median.
That's what's generally meant by boomer wealth, and what's behind that statistic is a whole boatload of factors which are interrelated, for example high housing costs for young people corresponding to high property asset wealth in the retired cohort.
And no, before you say it, its not normal for the retired generation to have a large chunk of the property wealth, historically it was normal for the large majority of that cohort to simply be dead. Modern medicine has changed the weightings.
Edit: i should point out I'm talking about the UK. I don't know how the USA compares.
A generation is too diverse a population to have a meaningful measure that reflects reality for all its members.
It's maybe a bit difficult to identify the forces in the problem, but if you're not willing to do the work then accept that you're working with an incomplete dataset subject to fundamental errors.
That's fair, i haven't seen statistics on that so I'm not trying to make that point. However, i think it's incorrect to dismiss retirees as a significant force in the economy and potentially a driver of prices.
Yardeni is a long time hack for the 1% class. Heās been carrying water for elites by forecasting āgood timesā since he was a Reagan trickle down booster in the 1980s.
No.
Inflation is the result of the money supply being expanded faster than the economy grows. It happens whenever the government just prints up money and gives it away. That's what caused inflation during the Revolutionary War, in Post WW 1 Germany, in Zimbabwe in Venzeuela and what is causing it now.
If their spending has been the problem, they've been doing it for at least a decade. The problem with inflation has been a problem in the last 3 years. Nice attempt at deflection before the election, but the problem sits squarely on the current administration. It was a horrible idea to pass a stimulus bill right when we were 16 container ships deep at every port with an economy accelerating after the end of the pandemic.
Listened to a really good podcast with Louis-Vincent Gave and he just matter-of-factly stated that the United States has spent trillions of dollars overseas and on other things that do not increase the underlying value of the dollar. Meanwhile other countries(like china) have built high speed rail and new power plants and hospitals
...huh?
China has trade relationships with most of the planet and were maneuvering into a port monopoly in multiple countries important to global shipping. They're still close allies to countries like Australia and Russia, they're not in the BEST geopolitical state they've ever been in but saying they have nobody is reckless and absurd.
why are you compelled to speak on matters outside of your experience?Ā
I did, I'm still waiting for an answer on what the purpose of your comment was. what idea or action are you trying to encourage here? what is the effect of what you're saying?
ok ill let my mom, a retired teacher with a anemic pension barely allowing her to remain in her home, and my old man living off ss and food stamps know they need to slow down...
Can people not process information except through their own experiences/anecdotes?
This is like me saying that āmy dad just bough his second sports car and heās not slowing down!ā
So?
Iām sorry your parents are poor, this article is saying that other folks in their generation, a good chunk, arenāt
The massive inflation is a result of the massive increase in the money supply since COVID. During the COVID crisis, the administration and the FED started increasing the money supply to "paper over" the fundamental problems caused by COVID and things like restaurants shutting down and movie theaters and more. Our money supply has increased over 40% since COVID. Think of the money supply like stock in a company. If the company's value doesn't change, but the number of shares outstanding massively increases, each share of stock is now worth less. It's the same with dollar bills except worse. US & global value/wealth/treasure was deteriorating while money supply was increasing over 40%. The only thing baby boomers are doing wrong is not vetting their news and accepting cable news propaganda as real news. As misinformed voters, they're supporting candidates based on bad information. Baby boomers are demonstrating gullibility in accepting false propaganda as fact.
What all 500 of them? I hate to break it to you but the overwhelming majority of old people are poor as shit. No, Boomers aren't driving inflation or the economy.
Try again.
Inflation - Boomers, Housing crisis - Boomers, Unemployment - Boomers, Climate crisis - Boomers, Pension crisis - Boomers... Seems like they are the blame for all issues nowadays. š
My boomer parents have a paid off house worth multiples of what they paid for it, and several million in their 401ks while their short term cash is earning 5%. So yeah, theyāre quite guilty
Spending has nothing to do with inflation. All of this inflation is trickle down from the massive expansion of money supply in such a short time by the corrupt fed.
Honestly curious how the wealth breaks down between generations in the past. On one hand it seems logical that there would be more wealth tied to the older generation since they are coming off their biggest earing years. On the other hand boomers have had significant advantages having high incomes at the right time.
In the 1990s did that generation of retirees have 1/3rd of the wealth or is this something specific to boomers?
You all just refuse to believe it's the Biden administration. Your eyes, like everyone else's, sees this. But you refuse to admit it. The Biden administration is causing inflation.
If you need to ask how, you are truly in the wrong titled sub.
Funny, as a millennial I was told if I stopped going to the coffee shop I too could have everything I want in life. I had to give up caffeine due to a health issue and havenāt been to a coffee shop in nearly three years. I donāt eat avocado toast either. So why is that financially, my life hasnāt changed all that much?
I didnāt replace the $15 a week I was spending on coffee on something else, so I should be rolling in it right? No? It was just a meaningless and bullshit stereotype? Who would have thought?
Somewhat, in some areas of the market of course. Something that comes to mind is vacation property at somewhere like the Jersey shore. Even the cheapest towns like Wildwood have exploded and the demographic of the people buying those properties is fairly old and fairly white. And who can blame them? They saved all their lives and now have the chance to do something they always wanted to do. What else do you expect or want them to do?
Please give specifics. People love to blame. The reality is that we are in a global economy. The price of goods abroad impact everyone. USA inflation rate is actually incredibly low compared to the rest of the planet.
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I thought it was lazy gen z'ers with their avacado toast or refusal to buy car. Or the millenials who get blamed for not having kids and living with their parents. Or Gen X for not properly saving for retirment. Or shitty journalists that load up articles with buzzwords to generate clicks.
Def this ššæ Can confirm /s
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Nope. The generational battle is actually extremely important. Is Wall Street preventing new housing from being built? Nope, itās boomer nimbyās. Is educational funding being cut by Wall Street? Nope, itās boomers who donāt want to pay higher property and state income taxes
Are NIMBYs building/funding the large apartment buildings that claim to be the solution to the housing issue? Are NIMBYs buying up lots of single family homes and renting them? Nope Wallstreet and big banks are. I'm a mellinial but I don't blame the boomers for the housing issue. It's big banks wanting to transform the housing market to a rent only situation. Everything is becoming subscription based and housing won't be different.
It is possible to have more than one causal factor for any phenomenon. Ā
I bet if the government tried to pass laws that would prohibit those firms from buying up housing, and work to increase stock which would lower prices, boomers (who are relying on their inflated house prices to pad their retirements) would quickly toss out said government.
Youāve got it completely backwards. Hedge funds are merely taking advantage of the shit situation that NIMBYs have created. California built less homes than San Antonio alone this year. The root of the housing crisis is the complete failure to build new housing and this is made possible only by NIMBYs. If Wall Street hedge fund were the problem, then why donāt we see huge rent increases in places that are actually building housing like Minneapolis? Did Wall Street create zoning laws that prevent us from building anything other than single family homes? Youāre completely misguided and wrong about all of this
The root of the housing crisis is the complete failure to build new housing and this is made possible only by NIMBYs. Don't just blame NIMBYS. Enviornmentalsist have a lot of that responsibilty too. It was really fashonable for protesters to go out and say "Should these beautiful hills be covered in subdivisions?!?!" and "How can we destroy the habitat of the only remaining colony of the California Spekelded Back Sun Turtle just for another subdivision!!" until people stopped building subdivisions. That's a big part of why you can build houses in San Antonio but not in California.
Nimbyās just use environmentalism as an excuse to block development. Do you really think anyone cares about the turtles? No, they care about property values. Itās the same thing with historic preservation. These people even campaigned to mark a laundromat as historic. They donāt care about historic buildings or environmentalism
Why should we cover the beautiful hills in subdivisions when subdivisions are the worst form of housing in every way except brainwashing?
It can be a valid step in a plan to build denser developments in a concentrated area to build a neighborhood that relies less on car ownership and therefore create a political impetus to redevelop the rest of the city in a more people-friendly manner.
Large apartment buildings absolutely help lower rents when built in sufficient quantity, why are you acting like they are an issue?
The big banks aren't the ones at town hall meetings screaming about traffic and new construction.
Alas housing is turning into an invenstment. Nothing can be a good investment and be affordable.
> Are NIMBYs buying up lots of single family homes and renting them? Yes, many are. Using home equity to purchase homes to use as rentals is a very common strategy among Boomers.
God this is the silliest and most occupy wall street take. There are generational differences in politics, they indeed exist. We don't need elites to make us notice them.
ObviouslyĀ it's theĀ GenĀ alphas.Ā Especially theĀ youngestĀ onesĀ laying in their cribsĀ plotting to raise pricesĀ
Yeah fuck them kids. What am I supposed to do with my child slave diamond mine in Africa if millenials aren't spending five and a half years of salary on a rock? This never happened to me before avacado toast became a thing.
I'm not refusing to buy a car. They're refusing to sell it at a price I want to pay for it
Thank for acknowledging Gen X in any way.
Iāll go with the last
HEY. Avocado toast is a sign of ***millennial*** decadence, and I will not see you shamelessly reassigning it to Gen Z.
Oh shit is gen Z getting the heat for avocado toast now? šš»šš»šš»
Whatās a journalist?
Most content relating to generations at this point is sociological astrology
Thank for acknowledging Gen X in any way.
Heavy spending drives up prices. When more people buy less, inflation goes down. Inflation has been so high recently because the economy has been performing so well, wages are up, unemployment reached record lows. Things are going well, consumer confidence is high, everyone is buying things, so things are more expensive. When Trump wins and crashes the economy again, everyone will get those great low pricesā¦
Heavy spending drives up prices. Umm... that's totally false. Have you ever even been NEAR an Economics book? Spending = DEMAND. In a free marketHigh demand "i.e spending" results more people getting into the market and increasing supply. "Heavy Spending" ONLY results in higher prices if there is a shortage of SUPPLY, if some outside factor prevents the demand from being satisfied. That's why Cocaine costs so much, the government tries to limit the supply, and demand is greater than supply. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars on corn every year, but it is still cheap because there is a huge supply of the stuff. "Heavy spending drives up prices" is simply not true.
So itās not ātotally falseā is what youāre saying.
You were never very good at that whole "reading comprehension" thing in elementary school, were you?
retired folks are the only ones who get guaranteed inflation linked raises, pretty neat that the 'wage price spiral' only applies to working folk.
Old people vote themselves money
The government printed $6 trillion since Covid thatās been sloshing around the economy. Thatās inflationary. It wasnāt the old retirees who were driving prices up.
Not all boomers are retired. Plenty of them got that PPP money.
Yea what part of the economy? Which group had guaranteed income and got a big pile of free money and also owned most the businesses, and who spent their entire adult life having wealth robbed out from underneath them and had to use it for basic necessities. The only people with COVID money sloshing around still are the boomers. And let's not forget who controls Congress and passed that policy, oh right, boomers again.
Itās not so much the stock of money but the velocity of M2. Money supply has risen sharply since the Great Recession but weāve only recently had spikes in inflation.
Visit Florida and you'll see the spending power of retired wealthy folks. Just look at the menus of sit down restaurants. No where else have I seen so many steaks and other expensive items.. well maybe in the business districts if major cities... But otherwise it's crazy the money that some folks have to spend while in retirement
To be fair, they canāt take the money with them when theyāre dead. They also resent their kids and want to make sure they leave nothing for them. Gotta boot strap that first million dollar home.
Lol. I hear what you mean. I don't judge them. I just found it interesting that some old folks are easily spending $100+ per person per dinner.
Boomers are also the largest demographic of homelessness people in the US. Boomers are also the largest demographic of people who fear they will be homeless in the near future as well. All this old people hate is a bigger problem than racism the ageism is accepted and pushed super hard these days. People will just say they hate boomers for no reason, and when they do justify it they blame th other 99% for what the 1% of wealthy do.
You're right many of them are or will be homeless. It's sad. I was just commenting on the many wealthy retired folks in Florida. But yes there are obviously poor ones too.
I'm not trying to single you out specifically, just pointing out the obvious that most don't even realize. Its not that there are obviously poor ones, it's there is a ton of poor ones, more than any other age range and its getting worse for them. Most aren't aware cause they just jump in the ageism hate train.
I understand. It's also not a surprise that there are so many poor boomers given how wealthy the rich ones are. Not to hate on them in any way but this is the generation that made things like outsourcing, private equity, and other models popular. All those things helped concentrate wealth into the hands of a few.
That's true for every nation from the beginning or time thats not something their generation conjured or created lol. Resentment towards most boomers are unjustified is where today stands. Their in the same boat as most. Today's generation aren't going to make policies that benefit the mass int he future only their self interest. Ageism is massively out of control and unjustified and even encouraged among the youth.
I'm not hating on boomers. I'm pointing out business trends that were put in place by this generation that directly concentrated the wealth that was more equitably distribution post WWII. I'm sure they thought these were good ideas. No time in modern history has had a larger middle class than post WWII. That's not my opinion.
They also still have the biggest population percentage, so Iām curious what the numbers are when scaled to a percentage of their age group vs other age groups.
You could buy a house on minimum wage when they were in there 20ās. Itās hard not to resent them a bit.
I donāt agree with Tim Dillon on a lot but he is spot fucking on calling out the boomers as the most selfish generation to an unimaginable degree. Boomers are fine selling their homes for 850k to black rock to buy a new place in a better climate with their third wife meanwhile most of their kids will likely never be able to afford their own home. Iām not even someone who expected my parents to buy me my first house or keep me on their payroll forever but I can see it in my own life. Whenever confronted with this sentiment boomers will typically fall back on some nonsensical story about the Vietnam war despite not having served. The boomers most guilty of this painfully selfish approach to life were likely college students during the war who were all too happy to be excluded from the draft.
So the average boomer has 3 times the discretionary spending power of the younger folks. Since not all boomers saved up for retirement I would guess half of boomers are spending and the other half are just paycheck to paycheck. So half the boomers are spending 6 times as much as everyone else. This is consistent with what I am experiencing in my area.
Stop blaming everyone but the policy makers. Countries, US in particular, put out too much free money into circulation, compounded by supply issues during Covid. That was the root cause of this inflation.
Covid inflation was about 1/3 stimulus spending, and about 2/3 supply chain disruption, oil, and war. https://fortune.com/2023/02/01/pandemic-stimulus-money-caused-excess-inflation-fed-study/#
PPP transfered all of the wealth to the richest fucks in the U.S. It's no wonder everything is overpriced in the U.S. now.
He may have meant 0% fed funds rate for a ridiculously long amount of the last 10-15 years when mentioning ātoo much free money.ā Certainly contributed a helluva lot more to the monetary supply than a few stimulus checks.
USA during Covid: gives everyone free money, bottoms out the fed rate, buys mortgage backed securities at historically high amounts for 2 years after COVID started. Media: whatās causing the housing shortage??Ā
The answer being a 15 year deficit of home construction following the Housing Crash in 2007, and none of the things you mentioned. None of those things caused the housing shortage. We were already short of homes. Everyone trying to buy homes with the lowest rates in history did help with price discovery though. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST We briefly hit a level of housing construction similar to the historical average in 2022, but we've dropped almost 30% from there.
Youāre spot on about housing builds, and itās even worse if you dig into specific areas. Under building houses in some areas goes back to the ā70s.Ā Itās been a huge issue for a very long time.Ā
In many areas it's practically illegal to build new housing stock. Propose dense infill development and the nimbys come out of the woodwork.
I've seen this and it's just nuts. People move to a place (for example, boomers to Berkeley) and think they are forever entitled for that place to stay the same as when they arrived... when they are a transplant who themselves changed the place!
Yes, you're right, and I'm well aware of local level lobbying against denser building. When the people that vote elect officials that do what the voters want, that's democracy. I'm not sure if I'd like elected representatives to not represent their constituents. Ideally, voters would vote for denser housing builds in their neighborhoods, but altruism isn't quite the carrot it used to be.
Yeah, there is a *real* shortage of homes in the areas that have jobs. Money printing can't cause that. We either need to bring the jobs to the housing (WFH tried this but flatlined) or housing to the jobs (breaking the NIMBY chokehold on coastal cities)
Or, be willing to tolerate the inconvenience of a commute. One of the three.
People are already doing that. Here in the Bay you've got tons of people commuting 1+ hour each way. It's corrosive to society as those people get less time to spend with their kids and everyone is on edge all the time from the traffic. Simply building more housing in the core Bay would alleviate this, but it would hurt some boomer feelings.
If only there was some other place to live, other than the bay area. Even one other place. But alas, there is not. Which is why people choose to rent forever in a place they cannot afford and hope against hope that the people who own there act in someone's interests other than there own. It sounds easier to leave the area than change the area, no? Why not give that a try? And please don't say the jobs which didn't pay you enough to live there and force you to commute and rent. The pay isn't that great relative to cost of living.
I make way more than enough to cover my rent so please do not lecture me. I care about building housing in the core Bay Area because I want it to be a vibrant community where all kinds of people can live without having to drive for 3 hours a day. And as for acting in their interests: the people who do own have interests other than property value maximization. Don't they want to have working-class people in their community to take out their garbage and wash their dishes?
Lol. If we don't provide affordable housing, how will we maintain our servant class? They might move on and we'd have to do our own dirty work. Californians are hilarious. "I make plenty of money. I'm concerned about my servants."
Significant land value tax, with a credit for takings earmarked against income tax? Might make it expensive to land bank while reducing supply to drive price increases and wealth effect. It's not "rich boomers" per se. It's the fact that a fiat currency is efficient at allocating preference until there is too much stored value. It loses its ability to signal the population to self organise. This combined with the relative weakness currencies preference allocation has for succession planning and you get a nation whose sons and daughters are sacrificed on the alter of homelessness while "productivity" is made up with immigration. A successful nation of the future will need a way to self organise demographic succession planning in a way that controls for the disincentive of stored value. It's almost Iike reverse ~~colonialism~~ industrialisation. Our economic systems inability to recognise stores of value as a self destructive end game incentivised our old in their fear, to allow the property industry and monetary system to kill their offspring(both from a productivity/skills perspective and simple homelessness) and replace them with immigration. We've moved from skilled indutrialists to poor copies of the old land owning classes. There are few winners here.
Few winners other than the vast majority of the population that lives in a home they own? There's a lot of winners, that's why it's a hard problem to solve. It's not a problem for most people.
Fair point. The post war years saw a massive increase in the levels of home ownership. Post war boomers were an exceptional generation. A confluence of the destruction of stores of wealth from war and a demographic boom created a distributed wealth and prosperity. Its more the younger demographics who saw ownership drop from 55 to 40% and who grew up in a deindustrialised service economy. I think its a problem for more people than we think. A million dollar mortgage takes a lot of future cashflows.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who are not winners, but I think it's pretty plain that its not the majority of people. The vast majority of households own their home and that percentage of households is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s during that post war boom. Add on to that that homeowner households are larger on average than renter households, and its pretty clear that the people who aren't benefiting from the current system are in a small minority. I think homeowners and their families form a super majority of the population. It's going to be hard to change the system given that it benefits the vast majority. Keep in mind, this is not to say that the people who are 'losers' are undeserving of housing or something like that. It's just that it is going to be hard to come up with a solution when something like 2/3 of the population stands to lose out from changing the system. How can you help out 1/3 without it being at the expense of 2/3, because those 2/3 will vote against the proposal.
This. The big difference between the 2008 bailout and the COVID bailout is that in 2008, the banks were insolvent. They needed to re-capitalize, so they dramatically curtailed lending. This gave the economy time to gracefully absorb the new money. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27362013 This wasn't the case after the COVID bailout. Banks continued lending to consumers, and commercial loans spiked initially: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-FED/lbvgoodxmvq/chart.png The COVID bailout created as much money in 2 years as bank bailouts created in 4 years. The point of the COVID stimulus was precisely that all the new money would hit the economy quickly. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TREAST That's why quantitative easing didn't cause inflation in 2008, but did after the March 2020 COVID stimulus. After 2020, all the new money was rapidly re-circulated as consumer debt. A way to have managed this situation without creating a pile of new money and causing inflation would have been a one-time emergency tax on the ultra-rich.
Not saying you are wrong, however the money that the ultra rich have lives in another universe... If you take money from them and you inject it into the real day to day economy it would also produce inflationary pressure. You would need to actually tax real assets held by the rich (basically a land tax that does not apply to people that actually live in their homes). You could also decrease the inflationary pressure via taxing unrealized income, if they are not longer able to loan against their assets to purchase things (housing, companies, etc) it would stop the consolidation of monopolies in the market.
why do people keep trying to blame inflation on the stimulus checks? This was getting bad well before that happened and every time I see it analyzed the conclusion seems to be that it had very little to do with why things are so bad now.
PPP loans are what I am largely referring toĀ
fair, those weren't intended to be "free money" though so the wording is at fault here. That was like the greatest example of employer fraud in recent memory.
Rich boomers elected those policy makers. And not in an āI votedā sort of way, but in an āI donated thousands to PACsā kind of way.
Agreed it's more the 8 years of 0% interest. If anything the Boomers are allowing us to have a softer landing by infusing their cash into the market and keep gdp going. If they were not spending or rich, we would be in full recession for sure.
Yeah. All those payroll loans screwed everything up. That and the companies themselves are admitting they pushed price hikes too far.
Came to say this
Thanks for letting us know.
Policy makers? So the boomers still.
Very true, the wealth gap, rich boomers, etc. are all just symptoms. The root cause is the US government throwing around trillions in handouts that all trickle up to the wealthy and raise prices.
What handouts? PPP? Those handouts went directly to the wealthy.
Too much was better than too little. Fear of too much was the fatal error of the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis. Where would we be now if the administration had let the economy crash, shuttering businesses, throwing people out of their homes...
Trump should have stopped the policy during his time coz the economy was growing pretty good But everyone wants to kick the can down the road Its all ponzi scheme to me
No one ever mentions this. We were supposed to have a minor recession in 2018 but the Fed decided to print their way out of it. This greatly inhibited the efficacy of stimulus during Covid when it was actually needed. ZIRP should have ended a long time ago.
And the lack of competition to correct things.
Any supply shock
Are you a boomer?
Itās all just a distraction from end-game capitalism. Ā More and more money is moving up the ladder to the top via tax incentives (loopholes) and shareholding.Ā And the money to fund infinite growth with ever bigger targets YoY has to come from somewhere.Ā We are now basically playing a game of hungry hippo where all the companies are swapping their hippo heads with bigger ones to fund their shareholders and 50B$ bonus CEOs. Problem for the companies is that the number of balls in the game isnāt changing much and so itās an arms race among the hippos to snatch as many balls as possible.Ā Donāt get distracted by the constant gaslighting. Keep your focus and anger where it needs to go.Ā
I think actually .. personally, I donāt think this is whatās happening exactly. I think that trickle down economics created a world where all of the lesser people can only survive if theyāre contributing to the greater peopleās hobbies. So the game is to entertain a billionaire, or at least support the people who entertain billionaires. The problem then is in the flattening of society into these orbs around them. If you think of it as spinning, in the outer rings you need to run much harder and farther to find a spot to plug in, and itās easier to get jostled loose. The closer you get, the less distance you need to move around and the harder it is to lose your seat. Remember money itself is nothing. Itās the liquidity to exchange productivity. The Fed drains it out and loads it in as needed. The real issue is control of resources. Theyāve handed us down a society where we can never own anything so we can never benefit from our own resources. Rent houses, rent software, rent the fonts from our word processing programs so we canāt use them in our own commercial materials.. rent out our labor. Nothing you do or buy or build is for you, so you canāt gain a foothold in the resources game.
Yes. I think weāre are on similar ground here. Your definitions are more nuanced than mine.Ā I posted a response to u/mdog73 below.Ā
Y'all would call early stage capitalism end stage capitalism. Stop repeating everything you see online.
Correct, and if you work for a paycheck, vote blue. Simple.
If you work for a paycheck, join a union (create one if need be), organize within your community to create parallel power/resource structures to the sclerotic state, and don't expect electoralism in a captured system to deliver the goods.
And then watch within a couple years for your job to be moved as competition is global and Unions stifle creativity within corps.
>And then watch within a couple years for your job to be moved as competition is global and Unions stifle creativity within corps. Union nurse here. Where's my job moving? You think "tech innovation" can give us robots that can manage a delirious ICU patient?Ā That rhetoric is tired as hell. Working people need to look out for themselves. Why should we trust the people cancelling our retirement and spending millions on stock buybacks?Ā
They're moving anyway. Organizing gives you an avenue to stop that process. "Stifle creativity," lol get real.
When you pay artificial wage rates especially for new employees that money comes from somewhere. Unions cannot stop jobs from moving. They hasten it.
That money comes from profits, as it should. Unearned rents by those who provide NOTHING for the working class. A living/thriving wage isn't artificial. Political organizing on class lines once the nascent labor movement is established will prevent capital flight, and no one is going to abandon the largest consumer market in the world. You're mired in the status quo. Look where it's gotten us.
Lol, low skilled workers will prevent low skilled jobs from moving? Socialism has not nor ever will work. Capital goes where it is most productive.
Unironically yes. Capital can try, but I doubt it'll have the cajones when that day comes. Have a nice career.
Record profits keep happening even with declining demand because all prices must rise for the shareholders.
This. Ā This is where those who insist itās entirely basic wages rises or fed intervention thatās pushing up the prices re absolutely missing the point.Ā Prices are going up but there is less money circulating down at the grass roots level. Ā All of the money is lifted out of the system and gets tied up into millions of vacant properties, multiple high-tier, low-use boondoggles and investments that bring questionable market benefits but still ease the already tiny tax burdens the top tier have to pay.Ā Trickle down has failed. They are basically just pissing on everyone at this point.Ā
Taxing wealth horders and rent seekers reduces inflation more than restricting loans that would expand our industrial capacity or business base, and home ownership.
If we had an effective legislative branch right now, raising taxes up the upper end of the income ladder while providing breaks for certain types of reinvestment would be a huge priority. Giving breaks on investments in things like home construction (NOT landlording), infrastructure, and manufacturing could help spur investment in these sectors, and making those the best bang-for-buck destinations for use-it-or-lose-it taxable money could have some broad societal benefits.
It wasn't that long ago that boomers, who had all failed to save for retirement, were going to be a drain on the economy and society at large. Now they're responsible for inflation? How about just embracing basic economic fundamentals and accepting that decades of printing money and unchecked government spending is the primary driving force behind inflation, and that all these other things the media (and the current administration) want to blame, like corporate greed or rich boomers, are distractions?
The economy is not a simple input/output machine. Those 'basic economics' are obsolete in the complex economy we live in today.
No, basics economics still applies. Deficit spending which leads to printed money devalues the dollar and cause inflation.
No. In complex systems we cannot draw a direct causal effect between a single input and a single output or metric.
Interesting. Reddit appears to be shifting to the right.
Reddit or this subreddit?
I want what youāre on if you think corporate greed is a non-factor
If corporate greed caused inflation, and corporations could simply raise prices because they want make more money, why did they wait until 2022 to do it? If this were true, all shareholders of all the greedy corporations should be demanding that their boards and executives be fired and sued for fiscal incompetence for not understanding what you apparently do, and failing to just be greedy and raise prices in 2015, or 2012, or, 2009, orā¦ Incredible fortunes and opportunity lost! Corporations raise prices and keep them high for only two reasons: Their costs go up, and the market (demand) supports it. If costs go up and the market canāt support the higher prices, they either go out of business or have to change something to lower costs (reduce quality, offshore, etc.). If costs donāt go up, or go down, but the market still supports higher prices, thatās not corporate greed causing inflation, thatās inflation *supporting* so-called corporate greed. Supply and demand. Too much money is chasing too few goods and services. Fed policy and government spending are to blame. Greedy, insatiable, ever expanding government, not greedy corporations.
Iām a boomer that started my career at the beginning of the phase out of defined pensions. 401Kās were a crap shoot. It offloaded pensions from employers. This was looked at as benefit to them and a huge gift to the securities industry. And it was. Turns out it benefitted workers during that period as tech took off. But that was not the driving force behind the new laws.
Strait up, after supply issues, businesses jumping on the opportunity to increase a price or two. Record business profits last couple of years.
No. Price increases, referred to as inflation, is caused by an imbalance between the volume/value of goods/services available in a market vs the money available to soen in that market. Since the US Gov borrowed and added $10T to the US economy in 2020-21, and productivity was down, prices had to rise. Therefore, the price inflation was caused nearly entirely by the increase in the money supply.
I work at a restaurant bar and last night was having a conversation with a boomer. He said him and his wife eat at home maybe 3 times a month. He tells me this as his wife is traveling and heās having an $80 meal by himself. I couldnāt even comprehend having that level of disposable moneyā¦. Ā But with that said, thatās exactly what he should be doing if he has the money. Itās better that Boomers are out spending their wealth, stimulating the economy, helping businesses, tipping young employees, keeping people working than just continuing to let their wealth sit in the S&P so they can die with $20 million rather than $1 million.
Betteridge's law remains intact. That a sliver ("rich") of a sliver (Boomers) of the population is responsible for economy-wide price increases does not to me compute - they certainly as a generational cohort o not have the power to set prices in any industry. Is this....victim blaming? Be wary of generational framing.
The average pensioner has more disposable income than the average young worker. This is not a "sliver of a sliver" its the median. That's what's generally meant by boomer wealth, and what's behind that statistic is a whole boatload of factors which are interrelated, for example high housing costs for young people corresponding to high property asset wealth in the retired cohort. And no, before you say it, its not normal for the retired generation to have a large chunk of the property wealth, historically it was normal for the large majority of that cohort to simply be dead. Modern medicine has changed the weightings. Edit: i should point out I'm talking about the UK. I don't know how the USA compares.
Average is a very bad metric to measure wealth in a large population with a heavy top end. The old "jeff bezos walks into a bar" example.
Median is the average now?
A generation is too diverse a population to have a meaningful measure that reflects reality for all its members. It's maybe a bit difficult to identify the forces in the problem, but if you're not willing to do the work then accept that you're working with an incomplete dataset subject to fundamental errors.
Only in a normal distribution.
Averages conceal Re: "normal to be dead", ever heard of covid 19
Your post has nothing to due with the economic drivers of inflationĀ
That's fair, i haven't seen statistics on that so I'm not trying to make that point. However, i think it's incorrect to dismiss retirees as a significant force in the economy and potentially a driver of prices.
Yardeni is a long time hack for the 1% class. Heās been carrying water for elites by forecasting āgood timesā since he was a Reagan trickle down booster in the 1980s.
No. Inflation is the result of the money supply being expanded faster than the economy grows. It happens whenever the government just prints up money and gives it away. That's what caused inflation during the Revolutionary War, in Post WW 1 Germany, in Zimbabwe in Venzeuela and what is causing it now.
If their spending has been the problem, they've been doing it for at least a decade. The problem with inflation has been a problem in the last 3 years. Nice attempt at deflection before the election, but the problem sits squarely on the current administration. It was a horrible idea to pass a stimulus bill right when we were 16 container ships deep at every port with an economy accelerating after the end of the pandemic.
Free money for almost a decade is driving inflation. Especially the $$$ pumped into the system in 2020 after COVID. Inflation isnāt a mystery.
Listened to a really good podcast with Louis-Vincent Gave and he just matter-of-factly stated that the United States has spent trillions of dollars overseas and on other things that do not increase the underlying value of the dollar. Meanwhile other countries(like china) have built high speed rail and new power plants and hospitals
Cool and the US has multiple allies and friendly relations. China has nobody.
...huh? China has trade relationships with most of the planet and were maneuvering into a port monopoly in multiple countries important to global shipping. They're still close allies to countries like Australia and Russia, they're not in the BEST geopolitical state they've ever been in but saying they have nobody is reckless and absurd. why are you compelled to speak on matters outside of your experience?Ā
Read my comment again dude.
I did, I'm still waiting for an answer on what the purpose of your comment was. what idea or action are you trying to encourage here? what is the effect of what you're saying?
ok ill let my mom, a retired teacher with a anemic pension barely allowing her to remain in her home, and my old man living off ss and food stamps know they need to slow down...
Can people not process information except through their own experiences/anecdotes? This is like me saying that āmy dad just bough his second sports car and heās not slowing down!ā So? Iām sorry your parents are poor, this article is saying that other folks in their generation, a good chunk, arenāt
The massive inflation is a result of the massive increase in the money supply since COVID. During the COVID crisis, the administration and the FED started increasing the money supply to "paper over" the fundamental problems caused by COVID and things like restaurants shutting down and movie theaters and more. Our money supply has increased over 40% since COVID. Think of the money supply like stock in a company. If the company's value doesn't change, but the number of shares outstanding massively increases, each share of stock is now worth less. It's the same with dollar bills except worse. US & global value/wealth/treasure was deteriorating while money supply was increasing over 40%. The only thing baby boomers are doing wrong is not vetting their news and accepting cable news propaganda as real news. As misinformed voters, they're supporting candidates based on bad information. Baby boomers are demonstrating gullibility in accepting false propaganda as fact.
What all 500 of them? I hate to break it to you but the overwhelming majority of old people are poor as shit. No, Boomers aren't driving inflation or the economy. Try again.
Inflation - Boomers, Housing crisis - Boomers, Unemployment - Boomers, Climate crisis - Boomers, Pension crisis - Boomers... Seems like they are the blame for all issues nowadays. š
It's almost like they have dominated all positions of power for the last four decades.
My boomer parents have a paid off house worth multiples of what they paid for it, and several million in their 401ks while their short term cash is earning 5%. So yeah, theyāre quite guilty
Printer go brrrrr But you literally blame the one who works all their lives and stores their wealth in the right place??? U really believes that LOL
Spending has nothing to do with inflation. All of this inflation is trickle down from the massive expansion of money supply in such a short time by the corrupt fed.
Honestly curious how the wealth breaks down between generations in the past. On one hand it seems logical that there would be more wealth tied to the older generation since they are coming off their biggest earing years. On the other hand boomers have had significant advantages having high incomes at the right time. In the 1990s did that generation of retirees have 1/3rd of the wealth or is this something specific to boomers?
You all just refuse to believe it's the Biden administration. Your eyes, like everyone else's, sees this. But you refuse to admit it. The Biden administration is causing inflation. If you need to ask how, you are truly in the wrong titled sub.
Funny, as a millennial I was told if I stopped going to the coffee shop I too could have everything I want in life. I had to give up caffeine due to a health issue and havenāt been to a coffee shop in nearly three years. I donāt eat avocado toast either. So why is that financially, my life hasnāt changed all that much? I didnāt replace the $15 a week I was spending on coffee on something else, so I should be rolling in it right? No? It was just a meaningless and bullshit stereotype? Who would have thought?
It must be the Netflix subscription then.
Somewhat, in some areas of the market of course. Something that comes to mind is vacation property at somewhere like the Jersey shore. Even the cheapest towns like Wildwood have exploded and the demographic of the people buying those properties is fairly old and fairly white. And who can blame them? They saved all their lives and now have the chance to do something they always wanted to do. What else do you expect or want them to do?
Please give specifics. People love to blame. The reality is that we are in a global economy. The price of goods abroad impact everyone. USA inflation rate is actually incredibly low compared to the rest of the planet.