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The past month marks the highest surge in inflation in forty years. Carter Hyde looks at some causes for this and some effects.
Since one year ago at this time, inflation had a drastic 7.5 percent increase on the Consumer Price Index. Leo Feler is an Economist at the University of California Los Angeles. He gives a couple of reasons for the high inflation.
We had services reopen. We had people feeling more confident about the labor market going out, consuming because of that, spending down some of their pandemic savings that they were able to accumulate.
Prices have been going up. You see it even with Tacos. At City Tacos in the USC Village, Hector Aguirre is an Assistant Manager. He says prices are under pressure these days.
It’s mostly I guess supply and demand. If prices end up going for our products, we try to get the best quality, of course, to make sure that customers get the best quality of food ingredients. And sometimes prices tend to go. Whenever we’re going to go to buy from the store, they get tend to go up.
But do consumers notice? Not always. Not even business majors. William Norris is a USC freshman at Marshall.
Well, I think it really depends on the good, but I haven’t noticed too many differences. I guess I’ve noticed differences in gas prices since competition has changed in the Middle East and Russia but that’s a more long-term issue. Overall, no, I wouldn’t say I’ve seen large-scale changes in prices.
And even though inflation may be at a historic high, Professor Feler of UCLA is optimistic.
It’s also important to keep in mind the economy’s actually doing well like we got a faster labor market recovery than we expected. This is part of the reason that we’re seeing higher prices and higher inflation is because people are back at work because unemployment is down at 3.9 percent. It’s because we’ve got, you know, labor force participation to begin recovering.
And wages are generally up, but unfortunately, so are the prices of tacos.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Carter Hyde.