I don’t care about what the bean counters say?
Prices ARE HIGH….
But the numbers in their computers say something different….
There are two starkly different ways of looking at the U.S. economy right now: what the data says has happened in the past few months, and what history warns could happen next.
Most of the recent data suggests that the economy is strong. The job market is, incredibly, better today than it was in February 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic ripped a hole in the global economy. More people are working. They are paid more. The gaps between them — by race, gender, education or income — are smaller.
Even inflation, long the black cloud in the economy’s sunny sky, is showing signs of dissipating. Government data released on Wednesday showed that consumer prices were up 5 percent in March from a year earlier, the slowest pace in nearly two years. Over the past three months, prices have risen at the equivalent of a 3.8 percent annual rate — faster than policymakers would like, but no longer the five-alarm fire it was at its peak last year.
Yet for all the good news, economists remain worried that a recession is on the way or that the Federal Reserve will cause one in trying to rein in inflation….
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The Fed began raising interest rates more than a year ago, but the effect of those increases is just beginning to show up in many parts of the economy. Only in March did the construction industry begin to shed jobs, even though the housing market has been in a slump since the middle of last year. Manufacturers, too, were adding jobs until recently. And consumers are still in the early stages of grappling with what higher rates mean for their ability to buy cars, pay credit card balances and take on other forms of debt.
The economic data that paints such a rosy picture of the economy is “a look back into an old world that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics…..
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Data from the Labor Department this month showed that employers were posting fewer open positions and that workers were changing jobs less frequently, both signs that the job market was beginning to cool. At the same time, the pool of available workers has grown as more people have rejoined the labor force and immigration has rebounded.