Almost alone among the world’s serious nations, Germany has scenes like this within living memory: During the 1923 Weimar Republic hyperinflation, newly-destitute Germans burned their life savings to keep warm or carted wheelbarrows of cash to stores to buy bread and milk. This wipe-out of an entire generation’s wealth led directly to Hitler and WWII, […]

So you’re driving to work, obsessing about how much it just cost to fill the tank of your SUV and how much it sucks to have to return to the office after a year of working at home in your jammies, when you pull into the Starbucks drive-through to order your usual, only to find […]

Australia has been in the news lately over its aggressive response to the pandemic.  But the bigger Down Under story might end up being interest rates. It seems that Australia’s central bank (RBA) had, like the Fed and ECB, been pegging short-term government note yields at extremely low levels, thus creating the illusion that local […]

After decades of stagnation, wages are finally rising. McDonald’s, believe it or not, has made the whole $15 minimum wage movement obsolete by starting its burger flippers at $21 an hour. This is a good thing, but also a complicated one. In Remember Strikes? we covered some of the ways rising wages will change the […]

Years (and years) ago, I was an unskilled 17- year-old who needed a job. So I drove out to a “foundry” (a factory that makes things out of molten metal) on the edge of town and asked if they needed any more workers. They said yes, hired me on the spot, and enrolled me in […]

Solar panels are basically microprocessors, so it’s not a surprise that they’ve been following their own version of Moore’s Law, declining in price by 5%-10% each year. As a result, solar is now competitive with fossil-fuel-derived electricity in a growing number of markets. Even unlikely places like Saudi Arabia, awash in oil and natural gas, […]

Here in the US, prices are rising, packages are shrinking and shelves are emptying. This is annoying, but it’s not (yet) the stuff of revolutions. The same, alas, can’t be said for some other places. One of the Wall Street Journal’s many recent articles on inflation contains this ominous section (emphasis added): The large central […]

Towards the end of financial bubbles, two things generally happen. First, legitimate ways to put capital to work become scarce as prices outrun expected cash flows. Second, large numbers of traders, who have grown used to seeing everything they buy go up, start chasing “innovations” with exciting stories but (in retrospect) insanely high risks. One […]

The prices of a lot of things are up these days, which fits the common definition of “inflation.” Meanwhile, an increasing number of products are appearing at the same price but in smaller packages.This is inflation’s slippery first cousin “shrinkflation.” Here’s a sampling from a recent study: • Bounty paper towels: The triple back has […]

There’s never been a generation as influential, for good or ill, as today’s Baby Boomers. So our mass retirement over the next decade should, in theory, be a big deal. One scenario has us selling our stocks and either spending the proceeds or moving them into less risky assets like bonds and cash. This reverses […]

It’s been hard, lately, to untangle the many causes of inflation’s sudden surge. How much is due to the pandemic lockdown distorting year-over-year comparisons? How much to crippled supply chains forcing manufacturers to pay up for needed components? And how much to good old-fashioned excessive money printing?  Whatever the cause, headline inflation numbers have been […]