What’s Actually Happening with Inflation Right Now

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 786 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There is perhaps nothing more important or contentious in macroeconomics right now than the question of inflation. On the one hand, there is a growing concern that rapidly growing money supply and increasing central bank balance sheets will inevitably lead to inflationary pressures. On the other, critics of that point of view point to significant counterveiling forces such as the 10% unemployment rate and growing savings rate among consumers. So who is right? What are the specific narratives trying to say? What is the evidence and data actually telling us? And how are real people experiencing inflation today?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	And I think if I have to point to something specific, the reality is that you can unwind consumer
0:05.7	demand shocks faster than you can unwind government balance sheets. And I think that is at the
0:11.7	heart of why people who are concerned about inflation are concerned about it. When it comes to what
0:17.6	happens next, maybe not in the next month and not six months, even the next
0:21.7	12 months, it's still less of a time horizon than when it comes to ultimately that debt
0:27.7	being due. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro,
0:36.1	Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.
0:39.6	The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDess.
0:49.3	What's going on, guys? It is Monday, August 17th, and today on the breakdown, we are talking inflation.
0:58.7	Specifically, we're asking the question, what the hell is actually happening with inflation right now?
1:04.5	Before that, I'm not actually going to do a brief today. I've got a long brief coming for you
1:08.9	tomorrow with a bunch of different topics, but I want to mostly focus on this main topic, this main conversation. However, I do want to go
1:16.1	back and just put a little addendum on something that I talked about last week. On Saturday,
1:22.4	as we were reflecting on the week that had been, I talked about Dave Portnoy, Davy Day Trader Global, the guy who had
1:30.5	just gotten into Bitcoin thanks to the meeting with the Winklevoss twins as an absolute
1:35.9	agent of chaos. Well, today, crypto, Twitter is absolutely shaking their heads as Dave
1:42.6	pumps out meme videos with him just absolutely pumping
1:46.9	a bag full of shit coins and doing it proudly. He even talks about in a clip how much he loves
1:54.8	crypto pump and dumps because it's encouraged. So anyone who thought they were going to be able
1:59.4	to control this force is feeling
2:01.9	what it's like to try to get a genie back in a bottle right now. But with that, let's focus on
2:06.8	our main conversation. What's actually happening with inflation right now? First, let's set the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Blockworks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Blockworks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.