We have inflation in food and energy.
The fact that you don’t see inflation in housing is because housing is still coming down from its bubble. Housing is still vastly overpriced and vastly overstocked - and the Fed are still keeping house prices pumped up with taxpayer money.
So, my daily lunch routine has been a Subway salad for a year or so now...Two weeks ago I went in and paid my usual $5.26 for that salad.
I went on vacation last week and when I went to buy another one today, the same salad cost me $8.21.
That new cost may or may not be entirely inflation, or it may be financial gimmickry at Subway or with the local franchise to increase profits, but it sure felt like inflation.
For better or worse, however, I will be buying a head of lettuce every other day now and pre-making my salads at home...There’s no way I’m dropping the better part of 10 bucks for a crappy salad every day.
Housing prices have collapsed by at least 30%. Even low interest rates have not stopped the slide which, if it continues, will decrease any rise in inflation. While the collapse cost me a couple of hundred thousand it also allows younger people such as my sons to afford a house. I guess it is passing on my legacy in another form.
“The fact that you don’t see inflation in housing is because housing is still coming down from its bubble. Housing is still vastly overpriced and vastly overstocked - and the Fed are still keeping house prices pumped up with taxpayer money.”
Correct. The age old adage is that a home should cost you double your gross income. The average gross income is about 40K. Ergo, the average house should be about 80K. There is a lot more house now for that price, but eventually it will fall to appropriate levels, or else there will be a LOT of empty houses (Or filled by foreigners, but less likely) and a lot of slums. Housing needs to fall by about another 50% to be in line with what people can afford. Just because we have had decades of Debt slavery, financed by the labor of foreigners, doesn’t mean we will continue to do so.
I expect to see multigenerational households rise significantly, which will further lower the price of housing. There is definitely inflation, but the housing prices people were paying were just plain stupid.