4/17/2023 0 Comments Moneymoney goddamn right“Our analysts who are looking at that sector still see another six months more or less of kind of stickiness and congestion in the supply chain,” Gruenwald added. Back in March, before prices really started to rise, it took a little under 20 hours before goods delivered into the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey would get offloaded, according to data from the agency. But it hasn’t been an even recovery across the country’s ports. “It looks like we’re past the worst,” Paul Gruenwald, global chief economist at S&P Global Ratings, told Intelligencer. Still, there’s reason to think that things are slowly getting back to normal. The Biden administration proposed billions in funds to keep the flow of goods going, and while the delays have eased up since then, that has more to do with conditions getting better in Asia. Facing bare shelves and delays, stores started to raise prices on the goods they did have. This summer and fall, the backlog of containers at major ports was so severe that one ship waited nearly eight weeks before it could dock and unload its cargo, according to the Wall Street Journal. have pushed back manufacturing, leading to a domino effect for everything down the chain. Normally, things run pretty smoothly, but wave after wave of COVID infections in places like Vietnam - the sixth-largest goods supplier for the U.S. This is generally what’s meant when people refer to problems in the supply chain, an interconnected global web of manufacturers, ships, ports, trucks, and deliveries meant to get goods into the hands of you, the consumer. One of the clearest ways to understand why prices are rising is to track how physical goods have been stuck in place. But there are three factors that have played a particularly important role in driving up November’s inflation numbers - and probably your monthly credit-card bill. consumers and Russian oil oligarchs and Asian factory workers - all pushing the planchette to a number on the board, and nobody quite knows where it’s going to land. Think of it like the world’s largest Ouija board, with billions of hands - including U.S. But the reality is that much of what’s behind the rise in prices is out of any one person’s control. The downside of the strategy though is that it could also send financial markets tumbling - as happened in late 2018, before Powell backed down and turned on the money spigots again. That is, if there’s less money to go around, then people won’t be so willing to buy all the stuff that’s getting more expensive by the month. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has signaled he’ll act to tighten up the flow of money in the economy faster than expected - a risky move that is designed to tame demand. So how much longer can this go on for? President Joe Biden tried to get ahead of the numbers on Thursday, saying that things are already cooling off, largely reflecting a drop in gas prices, that won’t be reflected in the CPI until next month. Things haven’t gotten that bad yet, but there’s a concern that this could get out of hand. It sunk Jimmy Carter’s presidency and created a decade of economic turmoil in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Inflation - at least at the current levels - has long been regarded as the archenemy of a healthy economy. Still, the economy is in a weird place - Wall Street thinks things are going swimmingly - as businesses around the world still deal with the pandemic. On average, prices are up 6.8 percent from a year ago, a sign that costs last month accelerated from the annual 6.2 percent spike recorded in October. Taken in isolation, it’s not a comforting trend, though rising wages and a strong job market soften the blow for many. And the cost of heating your home with fuel oil is going to cost 59 percent more than it did last holiday season. Photo: Xinhua News Agency/Xinhua News Agency via Getty Imaįeeling a little more broke than usual? The federal government released today its assessment of the inflation rate, officially the Consumer Price Index, and the numbers are higher than experts had predicted - and higher than at any point since 1982.
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