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An economist offered an explanation for a paradox that has emerged in recent data showing that spending has remained robust even as consumers report feeling pessimistic. Joanne Hsu, who is the director of the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey, told CNBC on Friday that she thinks Americans have abandoned plans to save money as they see their financial goals look less attainable and are spending money instead. “This positive spending is not a reflection of some sort of internalized secret sense of confidence that consumers have,” he explained. “And instead my interpretation is that consumers see that a lot...

Grocery prices fell on the whole in April for the first time in 12 months, according to data released Wednesday by the Labor Department.

On Friday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Surveillance,” Bloomberg columnist, economist, President of Queens’ College, Allianz Chief Economic Adviser, and former Obama Global Development Council Chair Dr. Mohamed El-Erian stated that the “sustainable energy” transition has helped create “a world that’s subject to higher inflation” than the world we had before.

I never imagined that we would ever see a time when it takes $177,798 for a family of four to live comfortably in the United States. Unfortunately, that day has arrived. Our leaders have been pursuing highly inflationary policies for many years, and now we have reached a point where inflation is wildly out of control. In fact, the latest wholesale inflation figure that was released on Tuesday came in much higher than expected. Sadly, this is just the beginning and we are in far more trouble than most people realize.According to an incredibly shocking new study, most Americans do...

On Wednesday, the country hit a sad milestone: Inflation under President Biden hit 20 percent. The dollar’s value has plummeted under his watch. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also confirmed that the consumer price index is resurgent and growing faster than average wages. Combined with weak GDP growth, this data shows the U.S. economy is reentering stagflation. Historic inflation is causing declining living standards and a cost-of-living crisis. Under Biden’s presidency, grocery prices have increased by nearly one-third and gas has risen by 50 percent. It feels like every daily convenience — from a turkey sandwich to some handyman help...

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent in April on a seasonally adjusted basis, after rising 0.4 percent in March, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.4 percent before seasonal adjustment. Advertisement The index for shelter rose in April, as did the index for gasoline. Combined, these two indexes contributed over seventy percent of the monthly increase in the index for all items. The energy index rose 1.1 percent over the month. The food index was unchanged in April. The food at home...

Dozens of Democratic lawmakers signed a letter to President Biden, pleading with him to act on high grocery prices that have been slow to fall as inflation has come down. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led the letter Monday morning, calling on Biden to "exercise your executive authority to take additional action to address rising food prices without congressional action." The letter amassed 40 Democratic signatories between the House and Senate, including senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and representatives Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., among others. The lawmakers acknowledged "Americans are facing sky-high...

CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed during an interview with Yahoo Finance that inflation was nine percent when he took office in January 2021. VERDICT: FALSE. A report from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate was at 1.4 percent in January 2021, when Biden came into office.

Inflation at the wholesale level rose much more than expected in April, the latest sign that price pressures within the economy remain elevated and difficult to tame. The Labor Department said Tuesday that its producer price index, which measures inflation at the wholesale level before it reaches consumers, rose 0.5% in April from the previous month. On an annual basis, prices remain up 2.2% — the highest level since April 2023. While the monthly gain is notably higher than the 0.2% increase forecast by LSEG economists, the headline figure is in line with expectations.

President Joe Biden’s policy of mass migration is forcing up housing inflation, so pushing up interest rates and mortgage rates, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Housing prices should have dropped amid the recent supply of new apartments and homes, but have “not behaved the way we thought it would,” said Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.. “I still think it will, but if it doesn’t, we’re going to have a hard time” bringing inflation back down to the target of 2 percent, Goolsbee told the Journal for a May 11 article.

This week in an interview with CNN's Erin Burnett, President Biden dismissed the 30% rise in food prices since he took office, saying "people can afford it. Thanks to Bidenomics, they have the money to spend. I've personally canceled billions of dollars in student debt. We're putting newly arrived immigrants up in hotels and feeding them. We're subsidizing electric vehicles so drivers don't have to pay high gas prices. Most of us have credit cards, savings, or EBTs. Many of our cities have effectively legalized shoplifting items of less than a thousand dollars. There's no crisis. The Republicans are gas-lighting...

President Biden claimed on Wednesday that inflation was at 9% when he entered the White House in January 2021, when, in fact, the consumer price index (CPI) was at a mere 1.4% at the time. "No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation," Biden told CNN's Erin Burnett in an interview. "It was 9% when I came to office – 9%." It’s a notion Biden has alluded to before. In April, the president said: "Look, we have dramatically reduced inflation from 9% down to close to 3%. We’re in a situation...

Breitbart economics editor John Carney said Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Kudlow” that “overspending by the federal government” under the Biden administration caused inflation, not tariffs implemented by former President Donald Trump. Kudlow said, “Because Trump might raise tariffs or use tariffs as a tool to enforce reciprocity, they’re all up in arms saying tariffs will cause inflation but you say they will not?” Carney said, “They didn’t cause inflation. They screamed about inflation when Trump was president last time around and we didn’t see it. It just didn’t happen. I tracked month after month these numbers, everything you could...

As the U.S. economy slows down, those at the bottom of the economic food chain are being hit the hardest. Homelessness is surging, the number of Americans living in poverty is rising, and more Americans are considered to be among “the working poor” than ever before. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a historic economic shift right now, and economic conditions are only going to get even more harsh during the months ahead. Needless to say, that is really bad news for all of us. According to a report from Harvard University, approximately 650,000 Americans were homeless at some point last year....

The Federal Reserve is stuck between a rock and a hard place. If the Fed pushes rates higher, interest payments on our 34 trillion dollar national debt could spin wildly out of control and bank balance sheets will be in even worse condition than they are now. First Republic just bit the dust, and literally thousands of other small and mid-size banks and in serious jeopardy. So it would be suicidal to hike rates at this point. But if the Fed were to reduce rates, that would be like injecting jet fuel into a raging fire. Our ongoing inflation crisis...

Stop! Stop! Stop! … all the printing! These people have to be stopped! We are talking about the nation’s unhinged monetary politburo domiciled in the Eccles Building (The Federal Reserve), of course. It is bad enough that their relentless inflation of financial assets has showered the 1% with untold trillions of windfall gains, but their ultimate crime is that they lured the nation’s elected politician into a veritable fiscal trance. Consequently, future generations will be lugging the service costs on insuperable public debts for years to come. For more than two decades these foolish PhDs and monetary apparatchiks drove the...

Jared Bernstein is perhaps the most influential "economist" in the United States. I put economist in quotes, despite his being an academic who has taught the subject and has advised Congress and the highest elected officials in America. I do so because he is a moron. He is such a moron that Paul Krugman himself admires him for his economic insights. He is that bad. ... This is absolutely priceless. And probably the most frightening clip you'll ever watch on the people in charge of the US economy. Jared Bernstein is literally the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers,...

Price inflation is no coincidence. It is a policy. Governments, along with their so-called experts, attempt to persuade you that price inflation stems from anything other than the consistent, albeit slower, rise in aggregate prices year after year. Issuing more currency than the private sector demands, thus eroding its purchasing power and creating a constant annual transfer of wealth from real wages and deposit savings to the government. Oil prices are not a cause of inflation but a consequence. Prices increase as more units of the currency used to denominate the commodity shift to relatively scarce assets. Therefore, oil prices...

Fed Chair Powell yesterday said he doesn’t see the “stag” in stagflation. Really? Well, in Q1 in the US… it failed to show up as non-farm productivity – or nonfarm employee output per hour – rose at a measly 0.3% annualized rate after an upwardly revised 3.5% gain in the prior period (well below expectations)… Source: Bloomberg On the flip-side of that – and echoing the market-worrying ECI data earlier this week – Unit Labor Costs soared 4.7% in Q1 (well above the 4.0% expected and the 0.4% rise in Q4)… Source: Bloomberg So wage inflation is confirmed – rising...

No one can accurately predict where the stock market will go, but it is a fact that the Biden administration’s spending imperils every American. After a strong run in 2023 and early 2024, stock markets have been selling off lately. I cannot predict whether this market sell-off will continue, but I can state what has happened so far and speculate as to why it has happened and whether it will continue. In my opinion, anyone who says he can do more than speculate is deceived or lying. After closing at an all-time high of 5,254 on March 28, the S&P...