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Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast today is Tuesday November 16th 2021.

I'm John Pauhritz the editor of commentary with me as always associate editor Noah Rothman.

Hi Noah. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosen. Hi Christine. Hi John.

An executive editor, Aide Greenwald. Hi Aide. Hi John. So I don't even know where to begin.

Not that I want to bore everybody with more inflation talks since we did so much of it yesterday,

but we got a retail sales number out this morning 1.7% increase in retail sales.

And I believe it was the either the AP or the New York Times tweet revealing this says

American shrug off higher prices continued to buy goods or something like that.

Well guess what? Inflation is not going anywhere soon because the only way for it to be

inflation is for retail sales to go down as a result of increased prices.

That all inflation means just so people understand all inflation means is rising prices.

That is that is what it means. No one inflationary period tends to be a combination of loose money

and rising prices as you know loose money as as produced by the central bank by the Fed.

But in this case inflation just as a term is not is neither a pejorative nor is it a you know

simply a description that things are going up in price. And so if you have an increase in retail

sales at a time of rising prices this is an undergirder of inflation and it only serves to

you know indicate that it's it's not going anywhere because people are still buying despite the

increase in prices. Yeah and your instinct is going to be to spend now because your money is

going to be worth less tomorrow. Which is another reason by the way that the housing market has

gone so incredibly insane. Think about it this way. So we saw last month that

inflation was 6.8% right over a year before. But you can get a 30 year mortgage at 4%.

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