Consumer confidence in the economy has been improving for a couple months now,
rising this month (September 2022 for the historical record) by more than economists were expecting at that. You wouldn't know it though to look at the stock market,
which is acting like the country is back on full lockdown. The disconnect here between Wall Street's perception of economic conditions and that of the actual public reminds me of last year, which was a banner year for stocks but one wherein most Americans lost money, only in reverse. Today, the financial aristocracy is panicking over good news for Main Street: wage growth is now tragically outpacing the rate of price hikes. Booooo!
Seriously, month-on-month inflation has been flat since the early does of summer while wage growth has been less flat. The culprit the experts blame? The Federal Reserve and their dreaded interest rate hikes! Of course, about 5% has been the average historical rate of interest the Fed has charged the nation's banks, but the fact that it
appears to headed back toward a similar rate -- back toward normal -- after 14 years of roughly zero appears to be cause for a full meltdown in their eyes. We keep hearing about a new recession. The inflation recession hit in the first half of the year, folks. (Remember those two back-to-back quarters of negative growth that happened to align with a marked dwindling of people's savings rates and increased bankruptcies and poverty?) The American consumer appears now on the rebound from it, in no small part owing to the Fed's actions to control inflation by limiting the money supply. It makes sense that a gradual return to a normal interest rate would tend to gradually return us to a more normal rate of inflation, does it not? I dunno, it seems to me like Wall Street is rooting for unusually high inflation these days. Maybe it's just me but that's how it strikes me.
One of the lessons I've learned from the whole experience of the last two years is just how much inflation sucks and that, ya know what, sometimes you actually do have to just simply force people to quit draining their savings on $#@! they don't need out of fear that the price will be higher tomorrow when they need it. Being just an ordinary working person who doesn't own any stocks, I'm pretty happy to be paying substantially lower prices at the pump than I was a few months ago and view recent drops in both
average home prices and
rents very positively.
Guess I'm just trying to say one more time, in one more way, that the interests of working class people aren't indeed always aligned with those of multinational business corporations. Most people view a more affordable cost of living at a 3.7% rate of unemployment as a good thing, ya know?