If you're looking for some good news, check this out:
Personal income skyrocketed by more than $4 trillion in March nearly all of it due to the $1,400 checks in the Democratic rescue plan passed earlier this year. Consumer spending increased $616 billion while all the rest was put into personal savings.
I'll confess to some confusion. The total rescue bill amounted to only $1.9 trillion, and the $1,400 checks supposedly cost about $400 billion. So where did the $4 trillion come from? I am puzzled, but if I find out more I'll let y'all know.
UPDATE: Ah. Dean Baker points out that this is an annualized rate. It's right there in the footnotes on page 4 of the BEA release! Sheesh. Would it kill them to say, "Personal income increased at an annualized rate of $4.21 trillion" in the main text?
Maybe it's one of those "on an annualized basis" figures like they do with inflation and other metrics, so you have to divide by twelve.
the math is pretty close so you may have figured it out
You mean we're not getting those checks every month?
What's an order of magnitude amongst friends???
First guess: typo
Oh NOES!! Four triiilllyuuunnnn?!?!? But that means PEOPLE have MONEY to SPEND!! It's a DISASTER!!! Inflation Monster coming to EET US IN OUR BEDZ!!!
I appreciate the sentiment, but IF the inflation monster shows up it's going to eat our bank accounts, and make our "bedz" more expensive.
I note that the world wide chip shortage is creating a certain amount of cost push (car prices are less negotiable, there is less price competition in consumer electronics, apparently major appliances are being affected, higher end computer graphics cards are expensive and hard to find, and so on) but I expect that problem will be remedied within a few months.
I for one am perfectly willing to incur that risk, for myself and others -- which btw no reputable economist of any stripe nor the Federal Reserve nor the bond markets are giving any sign of thinking is at all serious -- if in doing so people on the low end of what is turning out to be our second K-shaped recovery actually have some goddam money in their goddam pockets for a change.
And y'know what, if we're really worried about the highly speculative inflation monster, let's claw back some of that trillion-and-a-half dollars that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell pumped into the pockets of large corporations and a tiny number of already absurdly wealthy individuals, which did roughly nothing for investment or job growth or anything else except boosting the prices of stocks and speculative high-end bubble assets.
In other words, screw the whinging of the greedy rentier class about the farfetched possibility of some minor erosion of the real value of their static capital assets.
I want to know how much we are still paying for El Jefe Maximo to play golf.
He still has a Secret Service detail, & you know we are being charged to be on his golf course.
El jefe máximo de grasa. De vientre y de cabeza.
Inflation only starts rising when wages start rising, so I wouldn't worry about it.
Chip shortage? Part of the blame goes to the TX freeze. I forget where I first saw/heard that, but here's an explanation:
https://www.techpowerup.com/278625/manufacturing-samsung-semiconductor-fabs-in-texas-shut-down-following-state-wide-power-shortages
Looks like the blue states are doing much much better than the red states!
Simply amazing what 2 senators in Georgia did. People have money. And we're about to suddenly discover that the best thing for business is customers with money.
One Kevin Drum has consistently been guilty of reporting quarterly GDP growth figures without noting they are an annualized rate. Just saying ...
This data point should have had an asterisk the size of a dinner plate.
Why the hell would anybody report a one-time stimulus check as an annualized rate?