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Originally Posted by TWO-BMW
Wow, I've heard a lot of potential negatives for the future, but not any serious inflation. Of course, who really knows? However, per the recent predictions by national financial experts, and my financial team, we are likely heading for a serious economic drop in the US somewhere between this coming spring and early summer. But that causes the opposite effect. Houses and used car and other significant things drop in price, and value.
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I know several small business owners and they are seeing inflation in a big way. As an example one of them got notification last week that his main supplier was raising prices by 40% on December 1st.
We also have big energy cost increases coming just in time for winter as well. Hasn't hit as hard here yet compared to the EU and Asia, but watch what happens with propane costs and natgas over the next 60-90 days.
A lot of companies out there have held back pricing increases because the Fed and others said it was transitory. They took that to mean that there would be a quick increase and then we would see deflation and price normalization. What the Fed really meant was we will see a large price spike and then inflation, not prices, will normalize. Now they are worried that the higher inflation they have been trying to drive, will stay around a lot longer than they expected. That is likely to occur at the same time as the slow down in the global economy (for multiple reasons, new cold war with China, consumers are not willing to spend their Covid savings, continued consumer pessimism on new variants, etc) and we could see a nasty bout of stagflation.