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- Hacker News
- TLDR: the article describes stagflation in a novel way.
Yes, it’s happening, just as it did in the seventies. Invest appropriately.
by johnvanommen - We do not have high unemployment (yet?). And the economy is growing, just slowly.by warkdarrior
- The US is cooked. China is the new economic and industrial super power. The US "free market" is actively blocking all the future tech that the US can't compete with, first cars, latest is robotic parts. The rich are just soaking the rest of us for everything they can get before they GTFO.
- And go where?
- China is also cooked.
- > The US is cooked. China is the new economic and industrial super power.
The US economy has outperformed every economy on earth for the last fifteen years.
China is at a permanent disadvantage because the United States and Russia are the largest producers of petroleum and natural gas on earth.
Anyone who thinks China is going to be passing the US anytime soon is uninformed.
by johnvanommen - > Corporate profits drove more than a third of inflation from the start of the pandemic
This seems like it’s getting causation backwards. Shortages directly result in corporate profits somewhere, because there are companies that can raise prices. Most recently, in the oil industry, and in memory chips, and so on. Also, housing.
If there’s enough competing supply then they can’t raise prices. If there isn’t, they can and usually will.
Strategy often means anticipating shortages and having something to sell when they happen, but not overdoing it. It might be temporary but it can take years to resolve.
Deciding not to build new factories in anticipation of a memory shortage is a strategy. Often it’s justified by saying the shortage won’t last.
The people saying that the AI bubble will collapse are justifying a wait-and-see strategy that makes it worse.
by skybrian - > If there’s enough competing supply then they can’t raise prices. If there isn’t, they can and usually will.
Right, key word there is "competing". Large firms collude via all sorts of means to avoid competing. Many such cases
by snapcaster - "NoOneIsHappy.com" appears to be some sort of low-effort demoralization psyop or something. Who'd have guessed with a name like that?by MarkusQ
- Instead of ad hominem, why not read the article and refute? The sources are included.by plandis
- I assume it’s a reference to “everything is amazing and no one is happy.”by skybrian
- These blog posts appear to be well-researched and well-cited.by summermusic
- This is an interesting example of a pangram false negative. It's very obvious from the jump that substantial AI assistance was used, but feeding some samples in I got a 100% human rating. I wonder if it's a case of adversarial prompting?
- “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?”
- I feel like I am living in a different universe to the author. My beef still costs around $5/lb, my milk is still roughly $3/gal, similar on a lot of staples I buy regularly. My shirts cost about $5 for a t-shirt, and my jeans cost $20 or so. I spend 80% at Costco and 20% at King Soopers (Kroger).
Ancedota I know, but the author is writing like Big Business has 100% coverage of the whole market.
by Hasz - Sincere question: where are you buying beef for $5/lb? I shop at Costco and ground beef is close to $10/lbby agency
- Define "beef"? My beef is $20/lb for flank!
- Cattle herds are at historic lows to the point that meat packers have closed a handful of facilities, laid off thousands, and still have excess capacity. Your beef prices are either not accurate or not representative of the macro.
Is America Falling Out of Love With Beef? Surging prices are finally hurting demand for the country’s favorite meat - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-08-21/after-... | https://archive.today/2K1Rh - August 21st, 2026
Skyrocketing Beef Prices Finally Have Americans Reaching Their Spending Limit - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-16/skyrocket... | https://archive.today/9AYzx - August 16th, 2026
Tyson to Close More Beef Plants as Cattle Shortage Drags On - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/tyson-to-... | https://archive.today/KYI6P - August 13th, 2026
by toomuchtodo - The article contains 31 references. Of course, no report on the _general_ market trends are going to cover every anecdote in the US. It could be that the staples you mentioned aren't affected to the same degree. How about your non-staples? How about cars? Houses? Vacation expenses?
In fact, your comment could be read as the exception that proves the rule: you haven't been affected by rising costs because you stick to staples and avoid "frivolous" purchases (that is, you live frugally, as suggested by the article).
by cnity - This isn't going to get solved at the consumer level. Yes, one perhaps can & should attempt to vote w/ one's wallet, but the real fix is anti-trust law enforcement. TFA knows this,
> Every pattern above can be explained without conspiracy.
(… and in a section titled "Ongoing collusion", too!) but conspiracy also explains some of it: the egg price increases were industry collusion[1]; Americans lost something like $3B to $6B in egg prices due to it. The DOJ permitted them to settle for what effectively amounts to "don't do that again".
Did I try avoiding eggs while they were $6/dz? Absolutely, but meanwhile Tyson ate one of our local meat suppliers, and those prices immediately went up 50%.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_Clearinghouse#Price_fixing
by deathanatos - This is the wrong way to look at it.
In a K-shaped economy a business will not succeed by making quality goods at reasonable prices. Who are the customers for that? The middle class no longer exists.
Every successful business will do one of two things. Some will make ludicrous luxury goods at preposterous prices for customers that are not price conscious. Others will make mass produced garbage at insanely low margins in vast quantities.
The shortage is only the strategy in the sense that a large part of luxury goods is status. If you have a luxury product, you have to make it into a status symbol to get sales. Limited availability increases desirability. If something is too popular, wealthy people don’t want it anymore at any price.
The only solution is to end wealth inequality and restore the middle class. Tax the rich.
by Apreche - by MarkusQ
- > credit card debt hit an all-time high last year ($1.28 trillion, Q4 2025)
Let me inflation adjust that for you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpo. Even better, as a percentage of disposable income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpt
> real hourly wages, only 3%
Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XUpE. Doesn't look so dire to me?
Whenever I see someone quoting economic statistics I look them up on FRED and zoom out a little. Usually I close the article at that point. The "Ongoing collusion" table in this article is interesting, though. Capitalism breaks down without competition.
by cheriot - > Let me inflation adjust that for you
Oh, perfect! So what about solving every problem by going $40 more trillion in debt, to reach $80 T in debt?
That way everything will be good inflation adjusted?
- I don't think commonly used inflation is helpful for many people, instead asset price inflation is more interesting and reflects people's feeling more accurate.
If you use asset price inflation, in the last 2 decades, most people's real income consistently dropped.
by caidehen - https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
Also breaks down when few individuals command tremendous power. Tax policy has been //fantastic// for the very wealthy.
by conception - When prices rise and wages don't keep pace, individual solvency forces substitution of inferior goods. CPI's methodology then updates the basket to reflect the forced substitution and pretend it was voluntary. You think you are looking at rising real wages, but due to the basket methodology you are actually looking at the individual solvency constraint in a mirror. The economy could reduce people to eating bug burgers in homeless encampments and that line would still go up through the entire process.
Repeat the exercise using a real deflator and the results are different. Ideally, this would mean constructing a basket of things you (or the people in question) want to buy. In practice, nobody has time for that so people just use an asset with a reputation for holding value (gold) or a proxy for their most important aspiration (housing). These both have problems, but the problems are not nearly as bad as the circular logic in the CPI.
- > constrain supply, raise prices far beyond what the constraint justifies, and then refuse to lower them
In a healthy competitive market, this doesn't work. In a Ronald Reagan / Robert Bork / Consumer Welfare Standard market, where the idea that antitrust policy should promote competition is scoffed at and all M&A is allowed so long as a business can scribble with crayons on butcher paper a tall tale about how their merger will totally reduce prices (pinky promise!), an unhealthy low-competition market is the intentional and inevitable result.
- The most bothering aspect is that governments always hide behind a curtain of plausible deniability: "well you can't accuse us of not possessing a crystal ball to predict the future", except governments don't need crystal balls depicting the future.
Image companies A & B wish to merge for example, and claim lowered future consumer prices as a result of the merger. A government can shape this as a bet: proportional to your excess-price-over-prediction is positive, a government can institute a misprediction tax proportional to such excess. This places the prediction effort correctly with the companies instead of the government (if you believe governments were intrinsically better at predicting than companies, you'd be a communist).
by DoctorOetker - There is no such thing as a "healthy competitive market". That is a totem, or a fantasy. As is exemplified in the article itself, the reasonable behavior of commercial corporations is to make the market non-competitive and 'unhealthy', whatever the starting situation is.
But it goes deeper than this of course: A commodity-exchange-based economy only forms in 'unhealthy' situations, where people are dominated by powerful minorities which can control most property and input flows - lands, workshops, raw materials etc. Before that happens, economies are communal.
by einpoklum