Quote:
Originally Posted by tommy156
Prices will be coming back down, to mirror inflation. There's always a lag with these things. The prices being bandied about here are from the 8-9% inflation days. Two or three months from now, they will be lower.
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I’m not sure you are understanding the math here. Prices are NOT coming down right now; they are going up. The rate of increase has slowed. Year over year inflation is still around 3%, which means prices now are about 3% higher than at this time last year.
This is a smaller increase than the 8% year over year that was prevalent previously. That is why it is true that inflation is down. But unless there is deflation (I.e. a negative inflation rate) prices will not decline
The term “prices” here refers to the price of some hypothetical aggregate of goods and services; individual prices (such as gas prices) are subject to idiosyncratic market forces and may decline even as overall prices go up. In actual fact, generalized deflation is even more economically devastating than inflation. Consumers, expecting prices to drop, rationally postpone purchases. This leads to a reduction in demand, and therefore an overall decline in economic production — a recession. Persistent decline in demand leads to further price drops and a self-reinforcing cycle of economic contraction, much like the economic conditions of the 1930s.
Hopefully inflation declines further, but hopefully prices stabilize without dropping