The root of what’s going on here can feel obvious: blame inflation, which picked up in mid-2021 and throughout 2022. But that isn’t really the issue anymore, at least not at the current rate, because inflation is coming down. The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
I see your point. Inflation is simply the aggregate change in consumer prices. It’s kind of ridiculous to suggest that prices are rising if inflation is going down. Inflation is literally the change in prices for a defined basket of common consumer goods.
She uses eggs as an example, but retail prices on eggs are back down to pre-pandemic lows, and were high earlier this year because of an avian influenza epidemic, not due to supply chain issues associated with COVID.
Prices can still be rising even if inflation is going down. In fact prices should in theory always be rising because <0% inflation is essentially a death knell for an economy.
So the fed will do anything in their power to prevent that. That fed reserve rate would go down to 0% pretty quickly