Helen Gray 19644 posts 0 comments

Let’s get this out of the way first: I was wrong about inflation. When prices began ticking up a little faster than normal early last year, I wasn’t overly concerned. I’d been covering economic policy since 2008, and in that whole time (in fact, in my whole lifetime!), the US had never had a problem with excess inflation. In fact, our main inflation problem was that we had too little of it. The Federal Reserve, which is tasked with managing the money supply to keep inflation steady and unemployment low, set a low…

At the end of 2021, Food52, a company that sells cookware and gives away recipes, announced it had received a fresh $80 million in investment money from its owner, the Chernin Group. “The company is performing extremely well — way ahead of where we had anticipated,” a Chernin executive explained at the time. Fast-forward to April 2022: Food52 has laid off 20 people — 5 percent of its staff. A PR rep for the company described the cuts as a “realignment” — moving resources from one part of the company to another. But…

Yesterday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the US economy contracted by 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the first quarterly drop in GDP since the pandemic hit in 2020. That’s an alarming-seeming but ultimately misleading number; most of it is accounted for by changes in international trade (imports, which reduce GDP numbers, rose as businesses knew war in Ukraine was coming) and the shrinking of inventories held by businesses as consumers bought them up. “Final sales to domestic purchasers,”…

Two events occurred Monday night — one historic, the other rather insignificant — which placed an unflattering spotlight on the Supreme Court of the United States. The historic event was that Politico published an unprecedented leak of a draft majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, which would overrule Roe v. Wade and permit state lawmakers to ban abortion in its entirety in the US. Alito’s draft opinion is not the Court’s final word on this case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but the leaked opinion…