I have a question I can't seem to find a clear answer on. If the US government is behind the huge short trades driving prices down on the futures market, what happens when those contracts come due and physical oil is still extremely high? How will the difference in prices be handled? Are we, the actual citizens, going to be on the hook for this again? And if so, how could they even hide a bill that huge suddenly coming due?
Glad to hear you voice concerns about the Dems continuing the BS illiberal populist rhetoric and policy if/when they get back in power. I have the same concerns about tariffs. I don’t think anyone in the rest of my lifetime will have the gonads to take down trade barriers.
Excellent discussion regarding the political responses but pretty weak regarding how corporations respond when they see an opportunity to increase profits by increasing prices. When a consumer population is dependent or hooked on a product it seems to trigger corporate greed assuming the consumer has not place else to go. Corporate greed may be a constant but it is also frequently opportunistic. An example I observed in my public health career was that whenever a sales tax on tobacco products occurred, the tobacco companies would always add on to their prices to increase profits. So if a sales tax were raised by 10 cents per pack they'd raise their prices by an additional 5 or 10 cents per pack and blame the tax increase on it. This is not a behavior unique to the tobacco industry and not all that different from taking advantage of shortages, dependence on a product, blaming the weather or whatever when the opportunity arises - note the recent effort (thwarted?) to increase the price of insulin. Downsizing of food product packaging and contents, usually hidden, while maintaining prices is another common tactic. Having a virtual monopoly on product type is another opportunity - especially if another equivalent product and price is not readily available. Much of the regulation of corporate greed is controlled by the corporations themselves, and the politicians they fund.
"The Trump administration and its allies have cycled through various deflections and excuses for this mess. Maybe the price increases are temporary, unconcerning, or not that bad."
"And now, Republicans are getting around to greedflation."
It astounds me that the Trump administration is repeating all the political errors of the Biden administration, somehow thinking doing the same stupid thing over and over will produce a different result. Maybe they are just as stubborn and politically stupid, or maybe there just aren't any other plays to run in the modern playbook?
The Biden people told us "The economy is great! Don't believe your lying eyes! You're just too dumb to understand all these neat statistics. Jobs and wages are up (but inflation is far outpacing both)! Get out there and buy a house (despite doubling of interest rates)! Just trust us. This inflation is 'transitory'. Yeah us, at least we're better off than the rest of the world!" Americans thought they were crazy, and they chanted "Let's Go Brandon!" and voted for Trump.
Then the Biden people blamed price gouging. That always falls on deaf ears, because people assume corporations do that anyway, and that they are powerless to change it.
Now, all Trump has left is "Hey, what Biden said?...that's what's happening,...but we're so much better than Biden!". Politically craven Dems knew the truth, but played along. MAGA knows the truth, but plays along. Nobody else is buying it, or playing along. Nobody. In both cases, that's how you get to be a 38% president.
Catherine can you please go deep on oil and gas prices and their relationship. I don't really understand why gas goes up when oil goes up if the gas you are pumping is already paid for by the gas station. Is that speculative on their part so that they raise prices by $1 now so they don't have to raise them by $3 in 3 months or some other formula?
It appears to me that all I hear is from Trump Trump Trump. Where are the Democrats? Get off your butts, get out your bullhorns and start screaming about high prices for gasoline, high prices for eggs, high prices for almost everything. Stop whispering and start shouting. Enough already. Take charge. Call out the lies. Don’t just call them out, shout them out.
Perhaps one of the most lasting lessons I learned in college a few decades ago was a throwaway line from a professor that you can't explain a change with a constant. And greed is the ultimate constant. People didn't become super greedy early in the 20th century, become quite egalitarian for 30 years, become greedy again for a few decades, and then take a break from greed for a few years in the early 2020s. Deciding that economic fluctuations are explained by how virtuous people are in a particular moment is an almost cartoonishly silly excuse to not think about public policy.
What an insightful observation. I'll have to steal this and use it for my own. There are certain constants in human nature: greed, self-interest, lust, pride, bigotry, aggression, judgementalism, and to be fair, also a few good ones, like sympathy, compassion, loyalty, and ingenuity.
Human culture is so new on an evolutionary scale, that assuming we have evolved beyond any of the above is simply naive. I have always believed in living in the world that exists, not the world I wish existed.
The gas price fixing is a thing in my area. A clerk at an independent station near my house mentioned during checkout she had to call the “office”. She had to let them know how much per gallon the other independent station was charging. It was their practice to charge a penny more a gallon than that station.
This feels like a good case study of the general problem of getting the American public to understand what causes high prices in any given situation. The story might be hard and complicated to tell, and the data might all be noisy, but policy prescriptions still need to be made at the end of the day, explained at a level where the patient can understand. Greedflation seems like an easy diagnosis to reach for as a catch-all, where you can prescribe a placebo as treatment, without the patient being much the wiser.
I like the title of the article, "When all else fails .."
In the case of Biden, the sources of failure that led to high prices were moreso out of his control - first COVID and the failed emergency response under Trump, then Biden's difficulty to get buy-in from the American people on the prescribed policy response. That response had some distasteful elements to it, and took awhile to kick in, but seemed to have largely worked in the end.
In the case of Trump, the sources of failure that led to increased prices (on top of the already high levels) have been all of his own making more or less. He's reached for greedflation as a way to deflect attention away from the mess.
The placebo has the same effect in both cases - it helps explain away a larger more complicated thing that is happening at the same time, acting as substitute for understanding in a way. In Biden's case the complicated thing was the relationship between COVID, the global supply chain, and higher prices. In Trump's case it's probably the impact of tariffs on the global supply chain, along with the war in Iran's impact on the global markets, and the relationship of both of those things to higher prices.
From the American people's perspective they just see both political sides pinning the blame of high prices partly on greedflation - I'm not sure if they distinguish the causal factors in one case vs. the other. But the second case under Trump is very different - he is eroding the health of the patient in a sense, rather than increasing it. He could be making it more possible for greedflation to occur in fact.
It seems like in the medical field this kind of dilemma could also come up - maybe there's an analogy to economics.
Like what do doctors say to a patient if the underlying problem is complex, the cure is slow acting and a bit risky, and the patient doesn't seem to comprehend the diagnosis and feels dissatisfied with the prescription - does the doctor attempt a lengthy explanation to temper expectations around the cure's efficacy or give in and prescribe a placebo on top of the slower cure, so they can get a better rating from the patient? Kind of like how a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. That feels reminiscent to the situation under Biden.
And what happens if the patient is dissatisfied with the first doctor, and goes to someone who isn't certified, like a quack, for consultation? Do they get prescribed a placebo again anyway? In lieu of the slow but sure cure, does the quack order a bunch of unwarranted tests and interpret the results as if they're reading from tea leaves? Do they prescribe additional slightly harmful remedies, which they then "cure" to make themselves look more effective? That type of snake oil salesman approach all feels more like what we are getting under Trump now.
Ideally there'd be a doctor (i.e. politician) who is both competent and good at communicating on the patient's level, so that the patient doesn't seek out quacks. And ideally the patient would start to value expertise and competency again when deciding where to bestow trust. In the meantime I feel like we're liable, as the American public, to keep getting unsatisfactory explanations for why our economy is in a poor state of health. But I'm glad at least for Catherine's analysis to parse the causal factors of the economic conditions in each case based on the data. That seems the way forward.
The direct stimulus bill in March 2021 was totally unnecessary, and along with Biden's other spending bills, made inflation much worse than it needed to be. The true cause of Bidenflation was that Trump spent on stimulus as a futile attempt to preserve his presidency, and Biden did the same because Democrats never met social spending or a direct subsidy that they didn't want to use for social engineering.
Obama and the GOP Congress did it right. We had to take the tough love of his slow and deliberate recovery in order to avoid letting the demon of inflation (which took Reagan and Voelker a decade to conquer) out of the box it was locked in for 40 years. In the end, there was no post-2008 inflation, the Market thrived, interest rates were low, and housing and the economy boomed. But neither Trump, nor Democrats, were interested in taking our medicine during and after Covid. That is why the economy is so f*cked up today,...at least prior to the Iran misadventure.
I take all your points about Biden and feel ok to grant them, even though I might dispute the characterization a little. I understand too your position is more of the majority one, I think my view on the comparison of Biden to Trump on inflation may be more in the minority. So I appreciate you laying out the case - I'll spend some time to reflect on it and will see if I can change my position.
For now, I think there is still a large category difference between the decision Biden made to put the extra stimulus thru, at the uncertain moment we were in of actually needing to get the economy to recover from COVID, which did happen very successfully relative to the rest of the world, and what Trump is doing now with his profligate spending during peacetime on all kinds of misplaced priorities like expansion of ICE/CBP or the war in Iran, without any sense of balance, or rhyme or reason.
For me the distinction matters a lot on what caused the inflation - was it an external factor we have to deal with, or an internal decision, a situation of our own making? And I look at what is the trajectory - did the inflation decrease from where it was at the start of the presidency or increase? Lastly what were the promises that president had made about inflation and how well did they live up to them?
I wholeheartedly agree too that if we were better as Americans at taking our medicine then our economy would not be so f'ed right now. And I want us to get to a place of being better at that. But I think our inability to do that has been as true before under Biden as it is under Trump now so it's less of a factor in how I distinguish the job of one president from the other on handling the economy.
If I were to try and boil it down, the reason I feel our economy is so f'ed right now and for the foreseeable future is because Trump has no idea how to invest for the future. He only knows how to live in the past and doesn't show much evidence he's able to learn or change his ways now. In the past he tended to bankrupt his companies by making poor business decisions. But he was good at passing off the blame and the loss onto others. Now that he is president, it's we the American people who will be left holding the bag for all his poor and reckless decisions. We probably won't really start to feel the pain of the economic decisions he's making now until many years in the future.
I appreciate your reasoned response. Don't for a minute think that I excuse Trump for what has happened to the economy. Things were pretty good when he came into office, though I give Biden little credit for it - you can't claim credit for "replacing" all the jobs that went away only because the government shut the economy down. Trump has done nothing but interfere with the economy in stupid, reckless and immature ways: tariffs, a dumb foreign war, attacking the Fed Chairman, roiling the Market with his hair-brain proclamations, threats, and ruminations.
He's a complete incompetent idiot, who actually managed to bankrupt a casino. It's a shame, because Vought, Bessent and Powell are not idiots, and I'm sure they ask themselves daily "How can I keep this moron from burning down the entire world?"
As for Covid, some inflation was inevitable, no matter who was president, or what they did. You can't just artificially shut down the entire world economy and then start it back up again, without some pain from disruption and opportunistic profiteering. I assign blame for the Biden-era inflation to three parties equally: Trump/GOP get 33.3% because all Trump cared about was trying to avert a financial disaster that would cost him the presidency - and Mitch McConnell saw an opportunity to bring the Market back fast and put PPP money in his friends' pockets.
Democrats get 33.3% because all they want to do is put government money in the hands of the poor, and use it for social engineering - remember "Never let a good crisis go to waste". A Democrat said that. Dems support socialist policies like universal HC and minimum basic income. That's why they passed that March 2021 handout (which BTW, had no PPP in it for the rest of us). It worked, too. Covid reset/distorted wages and the labor market. I know. I own a small business and I'm paying some positions almost double what I paid in 2018.
Finally, the last 33.4% goes to ALL OF US, because we sat back and said "more please". The people who got direct checks cashed them. I put my PPP money in the bank, and used it to prop up my bottom line, twice. NOBODY pushed back or said, "hey, how are we going to pay for this?", or "what is going to happen when all this spending hits the economy?" We just grabbed it and said "damn the torpedoes!" The fact that there was no lingering unemployment from Covid (in fact, the opposite, we had labor shortages) is as damning as the inflation numbers. We used the government to prop the whole thing up, forgetting how hard it was in the 1980's to kill inflation it the last time we did that.
So we got 9% inflation, supply shortages, and doubling of interest rates to try and turn it around. Then Biden went senile, Trump got re-elected, and like a monkey with a knife, he's now crazy-wrecking it all.
Katherine you sound a little too much like Gordon Gecko. International economists have a term for our financial system-American Capitalism. I would call it in its current manifestation Grifter Capitalism. It will only get worse with deregulation. We are in for a whammy.
Completely unnecessary both sides-ism in this piece. Covid was not the fault of the Democrats. The current crisis is entirely the fault of Trump. During Covid, plenty of corporations recorded high profits meaning that price increases were not necessary. Corporations run by people made decisions to try to maximize profits during a crisis, and we can absolutely criticize them for that mindset.
Lol at the chickens lay fewer eggs cause data centers tweet.
That said, I think AI is a massive grift and communities are right to refuse AI companies access to their land and resources. The people trying to force AI down everyone's throat are Trumpian in their disregard for everything but their own egos and bank accounts.
Outside of some use cases where AI is truly much better than humans, they have little to offer us besides vague and unrealistic promises.
AI has already wrecked Google search and made it more difficult to tell truth from fiction online. I see no reason to start believing its boosters about how great and useful it will suddenly be in two weeks, a month, a year, etc. Like Trump, Altman and all the rest will say anything to keep the investment train rolling.
I have a question I can't seem to find a clear answer on. If the US government is behind the huge short trades driving prices down on the futures market, what happens when those contracts come due and physical oil is still extremely high? How will the difference in prices be handled? Are we, the actual citizens, going to be on the hook for this again? And if so, how could they even hide a bill that huge suddenly coming due?
👍😎
Glad to hear you voice concerns about the Dems continuing the BS illiberal populist rhetoric and policy if/when they get back in power. I have the same concerns about tariffs. I don’t think anyone in the rest of my lifetime will have the gonads to take down trade barriers.
Excellent discussion regarding the political responses but pretty weak regarding how corporations respond when they see an opportunity to increase profits by increasing prices. When a consumer population is dependent or hooked on a product it seems to trigger corporate greed assuming the consumer has not place else to go. Corporate greed may be a constant but it is also frequently opportunistic. An example I observed in my public health career was that whenever a sales tax on tobacco products occurred, the tobacco companies would always add on to their prices to increase profits. So if a sales tax were raised by 10 cents per pack they'd raise their prices by an additional 5 or 10 cents per pack and blame the tax increase on it. This is not a behavior unique to the tobacco industry and not all that different from taking advantage of shortages, dependence on a product, blaming the weather or whatever when the opportunity arises - note the recent effort (thwarted?) to increase the price of insulin. Downsizing of food product packaging and contents, usually hidden, while maintaining prices is another common tactic. Having a virtual monopoly on product type is another opportunity - especially if another equivalent product and price is not readily available. Much of the regulation of corporate greed is controlled by the corporations themselves, and the politicians they fund.
A lot of these commenters could benefit from actually reading Rampell’s columns.
"The Trump administration and its allies have cycled through various deflections and excuses for this mess. Maybe the price increases are temporary, unconcerning, or not that bad."
"And now, Republicans are getting around to greedflation."
It astounds me that the Trump administration is repeating all the political errors of the Biden administration, somehow thinking doing the same stupid thing over and over will produce a different result. Maybe they are just as stubborn and politically stupid, or maybe there just aren't any other plays to run in the modern playbook?
The Biden people told us "The economy is great! Don't believe your lying eyes! You're just too dumb to understand all these neat statistics. Jobs and wages are up (but inflation is far outpacing both)! Get out there and buy a house (despite doubling of interest rates)! Just trust us. This inflation is 'transitory'. Yeah us, at least we're better off than the rest of the world!" Americans thought they were crazy, and they chanted "Let's Go Brandon!" and voted for Trump.
Then the Biden people blamed price gouging. That always falls on deaf ears, because people assume corporations do that anyway, and that they are powerless to change it.
Now, all Trump has left is "Hey, what Biden said?...that's what's happening,...but we're so much better than Biden!". Politically craven Dems knew the truth, but played along. MAGA knows the truth, but plays along. Nobody else is buying it, or playing along. Nobody. In both cases, that's how you get to be a 38% president.
Catherine can you please go deep on oil and gas prices and their relationship. I don't really understand why gas goes up when oil goes up if the gas you are pumping is already paid for by the gas station. Is that speculative on their part so that they raise prices by $1 now so they don't have to raise them by $3 in 3 months or some other formula?
It appears to me that all I hear is from Trump Trump Trump. Where are the Democrats? Get off your butts, get out your bullhorns and start screaming about high prices for gasoline, high prices for eggs, high prices for almost everything. Stop whispering and start shouting. Enough already. Take charge. Call out the lies. Don’t just call them out, shout them out.
Thank you Catherine for being willing to report an inconvenient truth.
Perhaps one of the most lasting lessons I learned in college a few decades ago was a throwaway line from a professor that you can't explain a change with a constant. And greed is the ultimate constant. People didn't become super greedy early in the 20th century, become quite egalitarian for 30 years, become greedy again for a few decades, and then take a break from greed for a few years in the early 2020s. Deciding that economic fluctuations are explained by how virtuous people are in a particular moment is an almost cartoonishly silly excuse to not think about public policy.
What an insightful observation. I'll have to steal this and use it for my own. There are certain constants in human nature: greed, self-interest, lust, pride, bigotry, aggression, judgementalism, and to be fair, also a few good ones, like sympathy, compassion, loyalty, and ingenuity.
Human culture is so new on an evolutionary scale, that assuming we have evolved beyond any of the above is simply naive. I have always believed in living in the world that exists, not the world I wish existed.
The gas price fixing is a thing in my area. A clerk at an independent station near my house mentioned during checkout she had to call the “office”. She had to let them know how much per gallon the other independent station was charging. It was their practice to charge a penny more a gallon than that station.
This feels like a good case study of the general problem of getting the American public to understand what causes high prices in any given situation. The story might be hard and complicated to tell, and the data might all be noisy, but policy prescriptions still need to be made at the end of the day, explained at a level where the patient can understand. Greedflation seems like an easy diagnosis to reach for as a catch-all, where you can prescribe a placebo as treatment, without the patient being much the wiser.
I like the title of the article, "When all else fails .."
In the case of Biden, the sources of failure that led to high prices were moreso out of his control - first COVID and the failed emergency response under Trump, then Biden's difficulty to get buy-in from the American people on the prescribed policy response. That response had some distasteful elements to it, and took awhile to kick in, but seemed to have largely worked in the end.
In the case of Trump, the sources of failure that led to increased prices (on top of the already high levels) have been all of his own making more or less. He's reached for greedflation as a way to deflect attention away from the mess.
The placebo has the same effect in both cases - it helps explain away a larger more complicated thing that is happening at the same time, acting as substitute for understanding in a way. In Biden's case the complicated thing was the relationship between COVID, the global supply chain, and higher prices. In Trump's case it's probably the impact of tariffs on the global supply chain, along with the war in Iran's impact on the global markets, and the relationship of both of those things to higher prices.
From the American people's perspective they just see both political sides pinning the blame of high prices partly on greedflation - I'm not sure if they distinguish the causal factors in one case vs. the other. But the second case under Trump is very different - he is eroding the health of the patient in a sense, rather than increasing it. He could be making it more possible for greedflation to occur in fact.
It seems like in the medical field this kind of dilemma could also come up - maybe there's an analogy to economics.
Like what do doctors say to a patient if the underlying problem is complex, the cure is slow acting and a bit risky, and the patient doesn't seem to comprehend the diagnosis and feels dissatisfied with the prescription - does the doctor attempt a lengthy explanation to temper expectations around the cure's efficacy or give in and prescribe a placebo on top of the slower cure, so they can get a better rating from the patient? Kind of like how a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. That feels reminiscent to the situation under Biden.
And what happens if the patient is dissatisfied with the first doctor, and goes to someone who isn't certified, like a quack, for consultation? Do they get prescribed a placebo again anyway? In lieu of the slow but sure cure, does the quack order a bunch of unwarranted tests and interpret the results as if they're reading from tea leaves? Do they prescribe additional slightly harmful remedies, which they then "cure" to make themselves look more effective? That type of snake oil salesman approach all feels more like what we are getting under Trump now.
Ideally there'd be a doctor (i.e. politician) who is both competent and good at communicating on the patient's level, so that the patient doesn't seek out quacks. And ideally the patient would start to value expertise and competency again when deciding where to bestow trust. In the meantime I feel like we're liable, as the American public, to keep getting unsatisfactory explanations for why our economy is in a poor state of health. But I'm glad at least for Catherine's analysis to parse the causal factors of the economic conditions in each case based on the data. That seems the way forward.
The direct stimulus bill in March 2021 was totally unnecessary, and along with Biden's other spending bills, made inflation much worse than it needed to be. The true cause of Bidenflation was that Trump spent on stimulus as a futile attempt to preserve his presidency, and Biden did the same because Democrats never met social spending or a direct subsidy that they didn't want to use for social engineering.
Obama and the GOP Congress did it right. We had to take the tough love of his slow and deliberate recovery in order to avoid letting the demon of inflation (which took Reagan and Voelker a decade to conquer) out of the box it was locked in for 40 years. In the end, there was no post-2008 inflation, the Market thrived, interest rates were low, and housing and the economy boomed. But neither Trump, nor Democrats, were interested in taking our medicine during and after Covid. That is why the economy is so f*cked up today,...at least prior to the Iran misadventure.
I take all your points about Biden and feel ok to grant them, even though I might dispute the characterization a little. I understand too your position is more of the majority one, I think my view on the comparison of Biden to Trump on inflation may be more in the minority. So I appreciate you laying out the case - I'll spend some time to reflect on it and will see if I can change my position.
For now, I think there is still a large category difference between the decision Biden made to put the extra stimulus thru, at the uncertain moment we were in of actually needing to get the economy to recover from COVID, which did happen very successfully relative to the rest of the world, and what Trump is doing now with his profligate spending during peacetime on all kinds of misplaced priorities like expansion of ICE/CBP or the war in Iran, without any sense of balance, or rhyme or reason.
For me the distinction matters a lot on what caused the inflation - was it an external factor we have to deal with, or an internal decision, a situation of our own making? And I look at what is the trajectory - did the inflation decrease from where it was at the start of the presidency or increase? Lastly what were the promises that president had made about inflation and how well did they live up to them?
I wholeheartedly agree too that if we were better as Americans at taking our medicine then our economy would not be so f'ed right now. And I want us to get to a place of being better at that. But I think our inability to do that has been as true before under Biden as it is under Trump now so it's less of a factor in how I distinguish the job of one president from the other on handling the economy.
If I were to try and boil it down, the reason I feel our economy is so f'ed right now and for the foreseeable future is because Trump has no idea how to invest for the future. He only knows how to live in the past and doesn't show much evidence he's able to learn or change his ways now. In the past he tended to bankrupt his companies by making poor business decisions. But he was good at passing off the blame and the loss onto others. Now that he is president, it's we the American people who will be left holding the bag for all his poor and reckless decisions. We probably won't really start to feel the pain of the economic decisions he's making now until many years in the future.
I appreciate your reasoned response. Don't for a minute think that I excuse Trump for what has happened to the economy. Things were pretty good when he came into office, though I give Biden little credit for it - you can't claim credit for "replacing" all the jobs that went away only because the government shut the economy down. Trump has done nothing but interfere with the economy in stupid, reckless and immature ways: tariffs, a dumb foreign war, attacking the Fed Chairman, roiling the Market with his hair-brain proclamations, threats, and ruminations.
He's a complete incompetent idiot, who actually managed to bankrupt a casino. It's a shame, because Vought, Bessent and Powell are not idiots, and I'm sure they ask themselves daily "How can I keep this moron from burning down the entire world?"
As for Covid, some inflation was inevitable, no matter who was president, or what they did. You can't just artificially shut down the entire world economy and then start it back up again, without some pain from disruption and opportunistic profiteering. I assign blame for the Biden-era inflation to three parties equally: Trump/GOP get 33.3% because all Trump cared about was trying to avert a financial disaster that would cost him the presidency - and Mitch McConnell saw an opportunity to bring the Market back fast and put PPP money in his friends' pockets.
Democrats get 33.3% because all they want to do is put government money in the hands of the poor, and use it for social engineering - remember "Never let a good crisis go to waste". A Democrat said that. Dems support socialist policies like universal HC and minimum basic income. That's why they passed that March 2021 handout (which BTW, had no PPP in it for the rest of us). It worked, too. Covid reset/distorted wages and the labor market. I know. I own a small business and I'm paying some positions almost double what I paid in 2018.
Finally, the last 33.4% goes to ALL OF US, because we sat back and said "more please". The people who got direct checks cashed them. I put my PPP money in the bank, and used it to prop up my bottom line, twice. NOBODY pushed back or said, "hey, how are we going to pay for this?", or "what is going to happen when all this spending hits the economy?" We just grabbed it and said "damn the torpedoes!" The fact that there was no lingering unemployment from Covid (in fact, the opposite, we had labor shortages) is as damning as the inflation numbers. We used the government to prop the whole thing up, forgetting how hard it was in the 1980's to kill inflation it the last time we did that.
So we got 9% inflation, supply shortages, and doubling of interest rates to try and turn it around. Then Biden went senile, Trump got re-elected, and like a monkey with a knife, he's now crazy-wrecking it all.
Just noticed the graphic. That was clever and funny.
Katherine you sound a little too much like Gordon Gecko. International economists have a term for our financial system-American Capitalism. I would call it in its current manifestation Grifter Capitalism. It will only get worse with deregulation. We are in for a whammy.
Completely unnecessary both sides-ism in this piece. Covid was not the fault of the Democrats. The current crisis is entirely the fault of Trump. During Covid, plenty of corporations recorded high profits meaning that price increases were not necessary. Corporations run by people made decisions to try to maximize profits during a crisis, and we can absolutely criticize them for that mindset.
Lol at the chickens lay fewer eggs cause data centers tweet.
That said, I think AI is a massive grift and communities are right to refuse AI companies access to their land and resources. The people trying to force AI down everyone's throat are Trumpian in their disregard for everything but their own egos and bank accounts.
Outside of some use cases where AI is truly much better than humans, they have little to offer us besides vague and unrealistic promises.
AI has already wrecked Google search and made it more difficult to tell truth from fiction online. I see no reason to start believing its boosters about how great and useful it will suddenly be in two weeks, a month, a year, etc. Like Trump, Altman and all the rest will say anything to keep the investment train rolling.