The last time this happened, voters didn’t credit Bill Clinton. That may be a bad omen, or a good one.
If the stock market chose presidents, Joe Biden would be a shoo-in for reelection in 2024. The market rallied this month amid growing optimism about the economy, with the S&P 500 zooming 1.9 percent Tuesday on news that the consumer price index rose only 3.2 percent in October (compared to 3.7 percent in September). Stocks rallied again Wednesday on news that the producer price index fell 0.5 percent. Commentators are no longer debating whether the economy will experience a “soft landing” (i.e., a reduction in inflation without recession). The only question now is when it will arrive. The S&P 500 seems to have decided it’s already here.
But the stock market doesn’t choose presidents. Voters do, and polls continue to show they think the economy is in terrible shape. A Financial Times–Michigan Ross Nationwide Survey conducted November 2–7 is absolutely brutal on this point.
The markets say one thing, but grocery receipts say another. Consumers are still hurting, and most choose not to look beyond today and their own pocketbooks.
But grocery receipts are not an indicator of inflation, only of corporate greed and record profits. The Democrats need to a better job pointing the blame where it really lies.
I think one caveat here (and I’m not disagreeing with you, just adding a bit of clarification) is that the grocery stores aren’t the ones engaging in this. Generally, they have pretty tight profit margins. The massive growth of Aldi and other discount grocers in the USA over the past 10-20 years has made the profit margins remain tight. It’s the upstream producers where you see more of the greed.
Most people reading this probably haven’t even heard of a company like Cargill, even though they control a massive chunk of your meat.
Edit: maybe I should have said they produce most of your meat (or the plurality, not sure the exact numbers. They’re the biggest in North American beef, maybe other meats too)
I work in the corporate office for a grocery, you’re not wrong at all chief.
This entire year one of our biggest corporate goals has been how to either drive down prices for our customers or how to increase value for them so that they’ll feel their dollar went further.
Most people reading this probably haven’t even heard of a company like Cargill, even though they control a massive chunk of your meat.
Kinda curious what percert do. Fediverse isn’t exactly a random sample. I’d imagine it was be a small minority of the general population who know that. Honestly mostly only became aware of Cargill because of how much of the Venezuela food market they used to control (and the possible abuse of that position).
But grocery receipts are not an indicator of inflation, only of corporate greed and record profits. The Democrats need to a better job pointing the blame where it really lies.
what do you think “inflation” means to consumers? it’s the increase over time of the cost of the things they buy. Nobody cares if it’s coming from corporate greed or climate change or whatever else. They only care that they’ve already been living pay check to pay check and now they’re cutting back on food into ever more shitty options.
or housing. or any of a dozen other necessary-to-live things.
That’s fine but it has fuck-all to do with Biden’s policies and it’s beyond any President to change those things. It’s like when people judge a president by the price of gas during the administration. The reasons housing and food are expensive as fuck currently is
- lack of meaningful and timely wage increases for decades
- interest rates and other trends that were due to Covid response
- massive price gouging by cuntbag rich people
Maybe “nobody cares if it’s coming from corporate greed” but that’s just basically saying voters are incredibly stupid. It’s rather unwise to blame it on Biden, vote him out, and then get a Republican (especially the unholy moron in the lead currently) who will do absolutely worse about the real issues in every way possible.
The Democrats need to do a better job at giving people the money they need to get what they need, and controlling the out-of-control plutocrats wringing every last bit of spare change from the rest of us.
“Ok GOP, we’ll cut our yearly deficit by 60% just by only giving the welfare queen confederate states $1 back for every dollar they contribute in taxes, instead of the $6 that South Carolina gets. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and start turning a profit.”
“Hey, Joe Manchin: if you don’t offer your full-throated support to Build Back Better, we’re cutting off all Federal aid and investment in West Virginia, and we’re going to run nonstop ads telling your constituents why. Also, we’re going to break up your daughter’s pharma company.”
Time for some LBJ shit. But they’ll never do it, because they’re actually conservatives too.
A lot of people want prices to return to what they were before the pandemic. But that would be deflation. While the prices would get lower, if you actually managed to push the economy into deflation it would be an economic catastrophe. And the lower prices at the grocery store would be little comfort with massive job losses and the economy in free fall.
What people should want is for inflation to return to its steady slow rate. Which it has. The month to month inflation was 0.2% compared to a month prior on September 2023. Going forward that would imply a rate of 2.4% over the course of the next year, very close to the 2% inflation target. For October the month to month rate was flat or slightly negative. The inflation number reported in the news always is very misleading, that tells you the total amount of inflation that occured over the past 12 months (3.2%). But it was actually 0 from September 2023 to October 2023. When people hear those headlines they think it means prices raised 3.2% again over the last month, which is not the case.
The remarkable thing is that inflation was slowed to this extent without the economy going into freefall with soaring unemployment or other problems that can happen with raised interest rates. They seem to have struck the perfect balance to wrangle inflation but prevent a recession at the same time.
Wage growth has also increased and is now growing faster than inflation. That’s what you want! For the wages to catch up and make the higher prices a moot point. A deflationary spiral that lowered prices would be devestaring for the economy and most people would actually end up way worse off.
Outside of a socialist centrally managed economy with price controls and production control etc which has its own issues, I don’t know how they could have done a better job than this coming out of the inflation problems created by covid and doing it all without going into recession. But the popular perception is just, why isn’t everything cheaper again, I want everything cheaper again, must be Biden’s fault, I guess. Even though things getting cheaper again isnt realistic, and would likely be devestating for lots of other reasons that would hurt people if it actually was happening.
I hear about how deflation is supposedly the death knell for an economy, but have never heard an actual explanation for why. Inflation just seems preferred since it gives an invisible paycut to workers and allows holders of assets and debt (e.g. overwhelmingly the rich) to benefit at the expense of the value of money.
The idea is that with inflation, money today is worth more than tomorrow, with deflation it’s the opposite. So, in an inflationary regime, you’ll spend money before it loses value, either by buying things, or buying stocks AKA investing. In a deflationary regime, money gains value, so people keep it, nobody buys, nobody invests, and the economy starts shutting down.
Inflation is better for people in debt since it makes it easier to pay back; a lot of farmers in the late 19th and early 20th century pushed for inflationary policies in part to make it easier to pay off bank loans.
Deflation is bad for two reasons. First, as mentioned, is that it doesn’t encourage people to spend sooner in the market. Second is that it encourages investors to pull out their money from the market, since they may get better returns stuffing it in their mattress.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1888/economics/deflationary-spiral/
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp
This is a good explanation. And the great depression involved deflation if that gives you an idea of how bad it can be. What happens basically is if you need something in an inflationary environment, it’s best to buy it now. It’s likely going to be slightly more expensive over time anyways.
In a deflationary environment, the logical thing for any one person to do is to wait as long as possible to make any purchase of an item or service. Why should I buy it if it’ll get cheaper over time? I’ll just wait. So this is a problem, any transaction that involves the transfer of money, people are avoiding if possible. So revenue to employers is plummeting, they start firing people, they don’t need as many now. People have even less money than before, prices sink lower to try and attract business because everyone is running low on cash now, and around and around it goes. Businesses are going bankrupt and closing up, leading to more job losses. There’s tons of people looking for work and not many jobs, so pay decreases because there’s way more workers than needed.
If you have any sort of debt (face it most of us do), deflation is also devastating. Normally inflation helps with debt by making the debt value decrease relatively over time, it gets easier to pay. In deflation the opposite is true, and it gets harder and harder to pay over time. If deflation was like 4%, well then add another effective 4% interest to any rate to get the true interest rate on debt you already own or any new debt you take out. So now it’s extremely difficult to get credit or loans. People are mass defaulting on loans. More people losing jobs. Housing, cars, new businesses, storefronts, retail space, building projects, government projects, anything that relies on financing collapsing because no one can afford the debt. Even less money flowing into economy, etc etc. There’s more problems that crop up too.
It’s a feedback loop of an economic death spiral that can be hard to break out of, as seen in the great depression. Barring a radical restructuring of the entire world economic system or something, the best place to be in for most people is where we are now, a small amount of yearly inflation (~2%) with workers highly in demand so wages are rising.
Outside of a socialist centrally managed economy with price controls and production control etc which has its own issues
Boy are you underselling those problems.
Oh I know, tons of issues. It wasn’t supposed to be the primary topic of the comment, was just pre empting the “well actually” comments from the relatively high amount of communism and socialism proponents on lemmy. I’m speaking about how this all works within our current capitalist economy and system. I don’t think instituting price controls is a good idea. There are better ways.
The economy is not even close to being the main priority for me when I vote. I’m pissed about things like Roe and Jan 6.
And I’m pissed that the US does not offer universal healthcare, universal college-level education, universal PTO, universal family leave, etc.
You know, basic things in every other developed country in this world.
Zero chance I’m ever voting for a Republican. Democrats down the ballot for me.
I’m voting D too for the time being, but the Dems are never going to give us those things either.
The best Dems will offer is BS like means-tested limited family leave if you work for 3 years in an underprivileged school district first and then apply for a special program that will offset 25.7% of your lost wages via tax credits that can only be applied to the first $34,000 of income including HSA contributions but crediting back via deduction the first $500 spent on diapers as long as the diapers were 70% manufactured in the US blah blah blah
This Democratic party does not want universal healthcare. At best, they will grudgingly support universal “access” to healthcare. They do not want universal free college, nor free PTO, because that runs counter to the interests of their largest donors.
The best we can say about the current Democratic party is that they will, at times, pause the active arson that the GOP is inflicting on this country… maybe, sort of. They could have added DC and PR as states in the 2021-2022 session and given themselves a fighting chance in the Senate, but I guess they just kinda forgot to get around to it.
They exist to be a placeholder for whenever the GOP loses power, and a continuous fundraising lifestyle brand the rest of the time.
I don’t think that’s true. Lots of Dems support Medicare for All, which would be a good step in the right direction toward universal healthcare.
I also see the Biden admin do everything it can to get as much student loan relief as possible. But they are blocked at every turn by Republicans and Trump’s Supreme Court. I appreciate Biden’s efforts.
They also attempted to instate family leave and a child credit during covid. Again blocked by Republicans.
I hope to see them continue their attempts and hopefully succeed sooner rather than later.
I think you’re right in the issue, prices are higher now vs recent history and that feels bad, but there is an aspect to that which is more perception than reality.
Wages have been rising faster than inflation for a year and a half straight now, and real wages are currently higher than they were in Q4 2019.
So yes things cost more, but as a percentage of typical wage, they actually cost less vs 2019. Just doesn’t feel that way.
The problem is that Wall Street Wealth is not Voters Wealth. “Economy” has become “Riches Economy” - In a good economy, the rich profit more, in a bad one, the rich profit less (but thy still profit, if they are not terminally stupid). All the rest just pays for it, regardless in what state the economy is.
For normal people, the economy is, as always, in a very bad shape.
This is high-schooler thinking. Yeah rich people benefit more from the stock market and are more able to weather the dips, but the overall health of the economy is still closely coupled to the average person’s quality of life and employment opportunities.
The stock market is not the economy. Just because stocks have had a soft landing doesn’t mean that that’s translated to people’s lives experiences.
A company making higher profit has a higher stock price.
A company that can pay its workers less for what they produce will have higher profits.
Therefore the stock market is a measure of how effectively workers are being exploited.
The markets are reacting to what they think means the economy is making a soft landing. The fed was battling inflation, which usually means they press on the lever too hard and we have end up in a recession with high unemployment.
But we haven’t entered into a recession, employment is still very high and wages are currently out pacing inflation.
We still have catching up to do due to how much people fell behind during the period of high inflation, but this landing is way better than any other we’ve seen and certainly better for most people who may have otherwise been just unemployed rather than just struggling to stretch their current income.
What did you think a soft landing meant?
This is high-schooler thinking.
This is dumbass level name calling.
The rich have continually asked the middle and working class to surrender everything over the past 40 years in the name of “economy” and continue to rob them blind.
Wake the fuck up.
God will not reward you in the future for your pittance, even if his name is “economy”.
Most of us out here are one traffic accident or slip and fall from complete financial ruin and it’s absolute bullshit.
Next you’re gonna tell us that when the rich benefit the whole system benefits because the wealthy will recirculate their wealth back into the system
Exactly. Your downvotes here only prove the financial illiteracy/intentional misinformation rampant across lemmy.
Not to mention that the average person should be putting their retirement savings mostly into mutual funds, so when the market goes up it should benefit the average person directly as well as indirectly.
And do you have any criticism for the rampant misinformation being spread by major politicial parties, for-profit media empires, exclusive schools and giant corporations the world over, as they promise “this time, neoliberalism is really going to work”, even as they stake their fortunes on it failing yet again?
The average person doesn’t have retirement savings dude, that’s the whole problem. 80% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck.
Mutual funds generally underperform the SP500 as a whole, as well as most broad-spectrum ETFs, and carry an expense ratio 5x higher than VG/Schwab ETFs just for fun. And that’s not even accounting for the class-A shares that a lot of financial advisors steer their retail clients into.
No, the “average” person should be putting whatever retirement money they can scrape together into index funds via Roth and/or traditional IRA, then regular retirement investments. But most “average” people can’t afford to even sock away 6 months’ worth of expenses in an emergency fund because healthcare costs and anything associated with raising kids has gone up a gazillion percent in the last 40 years while real wages have stayed stagnant.
Oh, also try buying a house while facing all of that AND student loans that Republicans are too pig-headed to let the government forgive even a fraction of.
“Financial illiteracy” isn’t the problem here, reality is.
High stock prices don’t get people food, housing or healthcare.
It’s great news if you own a hedge fund, but completely fucking worthless if you can’t feed your kids.
Any time someone talks about “the economy”, you can freely substitute “rich people’s yacht money”.
The main problem is, that most of the things you need to help people are in the power of Congress, not the president.
The first two years, Manchin and Sinema blocked meaningful reform in the Senate. And now there is a republican shit show in the house.
“but hey, the rich people are doing fabulously” is pretty fucking cold comfort for the people that they’re unable to help. Read the goddamn room.
The economy doing well helps you feed your kid because you can, ya know, have a job.
And Trump, the self-professed billionaire who cut the taxes of other billionaires, is going to be SO much more beneficial for the middle and lower class.
I’m really sick of this line of reasoning that functionally goes:
- Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s fine, everything’s fine, and despite what your lived experience is telling you, you’re doing great because just look at the charts and the stonks. Yes, okay, you had to cut back on groceries, but did you see the charts? The economy is doing great.
And when somebody says “hey, this doesn’t align with my experience, can we just acknowledge that things aren’t actually that great and work towards fixing them?” The response is
- Ugh, why would you want to vote for Trump?!
MF, I don’t, but if the people don’t feel seen by Biden, they might not vote for him specifically because of all the tone-deaf paternalistic “stop whining about my economy, you’re fine actually” messaging. It’s kind of a similar vibe to answering “can we not support genocide in Gaza, please?” With “why do you hate Jews?!”. It’s just an attempt to avoid dealing with legitimate criticism while deflecting it back onto the asker. The clinton campaign already tested this strategy in 16, and we all saw how that turned out.
Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s fine, everything’s fine
This is, generally, true on all counts.
Anyone who doesn’t think avoiding a recession is better than the alternative is not a serious person worth listening to, and there is probably a link between their understanding of economics and their poverty.
The Democrats’ propaganda game is miserable in 2023. The big difference is that Clinton promoted himself effectively. Remember when George Stephenopolous called George HW Bush on Larry King’s show back in 1992, just to humiliate him? Remember Clinton’s bulldog communications officer, James Carville? Back in the 1990s, Democrats knew how to puff up their accomplishments and tear down their opponents. Now, they’re too timid to try. Time to drop this pathetic facade of objectivity and civility and fight, HARD. Their lives as a political party depend on it. OUR lives depend on it.
I never thought I’d see the day when carville is propped up as the paradigm of what a Democrat should be.
Bernie Sanders is what a Democrat should be and he’s been fighting basically alone since the 60s.
You’re right about their messaging tho. This is a direct reflection of rejecting the progressive wing which is mostly young people.
If the Dems would get their shit together and brace the next generation thos would be no contest.
It’s not that Carville is a hero. It’s just that he did what our current Dems won’t. I wish our team would be half as aggressive as the GOP. We would have a more solid standing with less effort. “Humans > corporations.” Done.
I don’t think most of the establishment actually believes that, is the problem.
Their donors with deep pockets don’t like that message, best we can do is Humans >= Corporations.
y’all can quote me economic statistics all day, what I know is that in the last few years I’ve gotten two promotions with raises and I still have less left over at the end of the month than I did before covid.
This is the truth. The fact that this is all due to inflation that was caused by Federal Reserve money printing during the Trump administration will be lost on most people.
Granted that was all due to COVID (and exasperated by ignoring it for a time), but still, Biden will be blamed.
Biden does bear some blame though. He repaired the economy for the top 10 percent. Even an acknowledgement that it’s not done or that Congress is blocking things that would help the rest of us would help him.
Instead it’s another round of, “my rich friends are happy, why aren’t the people voting for me?”
Granted that was all due to COVID (and exasperated by ignoring it for a time), but still, Biden will be blamed.
Worse most of it came from over 17trillion given to the banks before covid during trumps administration. This started the inflation climb which was then exacerbated by covid and supply chain issues. And you have the cftc prolonging swap reports almost endlessly to hide short positions being built in equity swaps with those banks. But no one will look to the fed reserve because it was “Biden’s fault” not wall street making bad bets again and getting another handout to balance collateral.
