“Is there any good reason to believe that inflation hits
low-income households especially hard?”
Paul Krugman, December 11, 2021
“We said was we want to see inflation move up to 2%. And we mean that on a sustainable basis. We don't mean just tap the base once. But then we'd also like to see it on track to move moderately above 2% for some time.”
“It is lower income people at the margins of the economy who have the worst experience, who experience the most pain from inflation.”
The Federal Reserve:
"Once you realize it's nonsense, it starts to make sense."
“It doesn’t matter whether you like that person, whether you like their views - what matters is the principle that you want to affirm. Do you want to live in a society in which people are required to recite ideological orthodoxies in order to be heard in media, to keep their job in journalism, or do you want to live in a society where there’s actually free speech, where people are permitted to involve themselves in debates, even with views that are unpopular, and not lose their job over it.”
“U.S. household wealth rose to a record of more than $160 trillion in the first three months of 2024 thanks to the stock market's record run and gains in real estate, Federal Reserve data showed on Friday. Household net worth rose 3.2%, or by $5.1 trillion, with the appreciation of equity holdings accounting for the lion's share of the gain at $3.8 trillion, the Fed said in its quarterly snapshot of the nation's private and public sector finances.”
I will note that the average net worth of me, Jeff Bezos and Bernard Arnault is $138.33 billion, and the median is $205 billion.
“NFIB Small Business Survey: Highest Level of the Year” Kinda reaching with the headline.
“The average monthly change in this indicator is 1.3 points. To smooth out the noise of volatility, here is a 3-month moving average of the Optimism Index along with the monthly values, shown as dots.”
“The US has created ZERO JOBS for native-born Americans since July 2018.”
“Propaganda very often works better for the educated than it does for the uneducated.”
“Propaganda very often works better for the educated than it does for the uneducated. This is true on many issues. There are a lot of reasons for this, one being that the educated receive more of the propaganda because they read more. Another thing is that they are the agents of propaganda. After all, their job is that of commissars; they’re supposed to be the agents of the propaganda system so they believe it.
It’s very hard to say something unless you believe it. Other reasons are that, by and large, they are just part of the privileged elite, so they share their interests and perceptions, whereas the general population is more marginalized. It, by and large, doesn’t participate in the democratic system, which is overwhelmingly an elite game. People learn from their own lives to be skeptical, and in fact most of them are. There’s a lot of skepticism and dissent and so on.”
“…the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”
George Orwell, Letter to Noel Wilmett, May 18, 1944
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Havenstein Moment. to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.