July Inflation | Page 2 | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

Norman1 said
That's great for your dentist to retire early and perhaps doing something more enjoyable. But, there's no shortage of dentists.

Around here, dental clinics have been popping up in all the major malls and even in the small strip malls. If one's dentist retires, just go to the next closest mall or strip mall.

There's no shortage of labour for farm harvesting. The positions are just not competitive. I can get the same minimum wage working in an air-conditioned insect-free fast food restaurant, instead of working out in a field somewhere in the hot sun.

I think lots of the labour shortages are from lack of child care. That restaurant will have trouble getting their staff back when the kids are attending school remotely at home instead of going in person to school.
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Yes, I've heard stories about restaurants hiking prices substantially. Supposedly, one restaurant in town hiked the price of their plates from something like $14.99 to $29.99! Well, good luck with that!

If that nice tenderloin steak at a restaurant goes from 5X the grocery store price to 10X, then it becomes really worthwhile for me to cook it myself at home.  

Yes, I know there is a surplus of dentists. As I said earlier, the retiring dentist is the person I happen to know about personally. There are others in other jobs who are also retiring earlier than intended according to media reports.

Very few restaurants are going to be crazy enough to hike prices 100%. Most will go for about 10-20%. I'm willing to pay that for the restaurants I want to stay open, but I only do takeout or delivery. Food prices will continue to rise, so that the margin between cooking at home and restaurant food may not be as great as expected. More likely, people will buy cheaper foods or go to cheaper restaurants. As someone else said, these prices will not go down. And there are media reports that there will be food shortages in various parts of the world this winter due to climate issues.

A drive around Leamington or Bradford or Beaverton (in Ontario) or any number of other places suggests that farm labor is mostly provided by temporary foreign workers, who do much more than harvest work. Normally, they can be seen on the rural roads on bicycles, but those may be scarce this year. A couple of years ago, the anglican cathedral in Toronto was collecting used bikes to donate to the temporary foreign farm worker in the Beaverton area. There is no competition from local workers because the pay is too low to even support the travel required to get to work. A long time ago, I did farm labour for a short while. We hitchhiked and camped. I wouldn't recommend it. The only kind of farm work that paid decently in southwestern Ontario was tobacco. It was hard work, but I think it's all gone now.

A friend of ours ordered a new bike in early Spring. Eventually he cancelled the order as there was no hope of receiving it this year and they could not give him any idea when it might arrive.

Lack of affordable day care is a perennial problem, exacerbated by the pandemic. People with decent jobs seem to have been able to work at home when schools are closed, form what I've seen. It's the people with crappy jobs that have been really stuck; if they quit work to look after their kids, they can't pay the rent.

I try not to worry too much about 1 or 2 data points. We need more that that to see the real trend.

The pandemic has had a major impact on a lot of things. Last year's lockdowns significantly reduced demand for gasoline and prices dropped due to oversupply. Now they're back up vs last year but not that much higher than before the pandemic.

The lockdowns also reduced supply of renovation materials while demand went way up as people chose to renovate and upgrade appliances. This are stabilizing. Wholesale prices are dropping. Retail prices will drop eventually as demand stabilizes and competition returns to normal.

People working, studying and playing from home, drove up the demand for personal electronics, shifting production away from automotive electronics (car sales were way down since we weren't driving) to personal electronics creating the auto shortages we're experiencing now as we want new ones again. But this will stabilize soon too ...

I'm more concerned with food supply and prices personally as climate change is creating significant crop issues around the world this year. Some of us may want, but not really need, new cars but all of us need new food every day/week/month.

A lesson from debasing one's currency from Ancient Rome.

https://warwickeconomics.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/the-debasement-of-the-roman-currency/

Speaking of food wastage, there are apparently different standards in place that odd shaping veggies will get tossed out even tho they are perfectly fine. Something about ‘uniform shape’ criteria….

As to office vs home toilet paper, that is a genius response lol

If a country increases its money supply, creating temporary money, it may have to be paid back (the money taken out of circulation has to be bought from someone) at some point. Central banks have a lot of control over this, though, and more experience and perspective than ancient Rome. Better input data and more tools to control the economy.

But the housing and environmental problems demand that we limit population growth. Nobody out there is even willing to talk about it, because all the supply-siders have been counting on ever-larger populations of poor people to provide for them. And, damnit, keep your paws off my pension!

RetirEd said
If a country increases its money supply, creating temporary money, it may have to be paid back (the money taken out of circulation has to be bought from someone) at some point. Central banks have a lot of control over this, though, and more experience and perspective than ancient Rome. …

The money is paid back. Bank of Canada created the money and bought treasury bills, commercial paper, bankers’ acceptances, and government bonds with the money. When they mature, the money comes back to the Bank of Canada.

The money spent on treasury bills, commercial paper, and bankers’ acceptances have come back already, with interest. The money in bonds will come back when the bonds mature. That money can come back earlier when a pension fund, investment fund, or ETF wishes to buy bonds. Bank of Canada is quite happy to supply those bonds and get the money back.

When the money comes back, the Bank of Canada is not going to chase consumer goods with the money and push up consumer inflation. The money will sit in an account. That why I see that silly picture of money chasing goods as bogus.

So if money creation is cool (and why would a gov't ever borrow on the markets if just creating money is the way to go?), Norman1, what did countries that have experienced severe inflation do wrong? Is it that they left it all out in the economy instead of (eventually) just letting it "sit in an account"? If I understand what you're saying looks like I can drop my fear of inflation, and for me that would be cool!