It’s coming.

JPMorgan Chase has been “effectively stockpiling” cash rather than using it to buy Treasuries or other investments because of the possibility higher inflation will force the Federal Reserve to boost interest rates, Dimon said Monday during a conference. The biggest U.S. bank by assets has positioned itself to benefit from rising interest rates, which will let it buy higher-yielding assets, he said.

 

“We have a lot of cash and capability and we’re going to be very patient, because I think you have a very good chance inflation will be more than transitory,” said Dimon, longtime JPMorgan CEO.

 

“If you look at our balance sheet, we have $500 billion in cash, we’ve actually been effectively stockpiling more and more cash waiting for opportunities to invest at higher rates,” Dimon said. “I do expect to see higher rates and more inflation, and we’re prepared for that.”

You cannot print trillion of dollars and pump them into the economy without an impact. The impact is that all of us are spending more just to get by.

Don’t tell Costco executives that inflation is low.

 

The big-box club chain said it’s been seeing accelerating prices across a range of products, including shipping containers, aluminum foil and a 20% spike in meat prices over the past month.

“Inflationary factors abound,” CFO Richard Galanti said on the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings call Thursday.

 

“These include higher labor costs, higher freight costs, higher transportation demand, along with the container shortage and port delays … increased demand in various product categories some shortages, various shortages of everything from chips to oils and chemical supplies by facilities hit by the Gulf freeze and storms and, in some cases, higher commodity prices,” he added.

 

Costco reported a profit of $2.75 a share for the period, well above Wall Street estimates. It also saw revenues of $45.3 billion that also beat the Street, which had been looking for $43.6 billion.

Inflation is soaring and personal income is declining. Hey, but at least his tweets are nicer.

A key inflation indicator rose a faster-than-expected 3.1% in April as price pressures built in the rapidly expanding U.S. economy, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

 

The core personal consumption expenditures index was forecast to increase 2.9% after rising 1.9% in March. Federal Reserve officials consider the measure to be the best gauge for inflation, though they watch a number of metrics.

As part of its price stability mandate, the Fed considers 2% to be healthy, though it is committed to letting the level average higher than usual in the interest of promoting full employment.

 

[…]

 

That increase in inflation came with a sharp deceleration in personal income, which declined 13.1%. But that actually was less than the 14% estimate. Personal income had surged 20.9% in March following the latest round of government stimulus checks.

Even Trump could not change the basic economics of tariffs.

On average, just 7.6 percent of the U.S. tariffs ended up being absorbed by China, while the rest of the tab was picked up by Americans.

 

For Chinese products that saw tariff rates rise to 20 percent, about 95 percent of the cost ended up being paid by U.S. consumers. But when China imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, a significant portion of the cost fell on American businesses.

 

“U.S. exporters, unlike China’s exporters, lowered by roughly 50% the prices of goods affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs, carrying a much higher cost burden than foreign importers of goods under U.S. tariffs,” Moody’s Associate Analyst Dima Cvetkova wrote in the report the released Monday.

 

The reason for the disparity has to do with the kinds of goods that were targeted by each side in the trade war, and how some are easier than others to source elsewhere.

 

The Moody’s report also found that U.S. importers absorbed most of the costs, passing only a small percentage onto consumers in the form of higher prices.

 

President Biden came into office opposing the tariffs, which now cover half of all bilateral trade flows with China, but has yet to remove them.

Be certain that those who have always opposed this requirement will use the pandemic as an excuse to prevent it from being reinstated. This is a simple social contract. We are generous people who are cool with helping out people who are out of work due to no fault of their own. But if you can’t work, then the the unemployment system isn’t for you. It isn’t supposed to be welfare. And if you don’t want to work, that’s on you. The rest of us aren’t going to pay able-bodied people to sit at home and play video games.

A tenet of the U.S. unemployment system has been that anyone collecting benefits, in good times and bad, must look for work.

 

That quid pro quo changed early in the pandemic. Profound fears of contagion and the sudden need for millions of workers to become caregivers led states to lift the requirements for reasons both practical and compassionate.

 

But as vaccinations increase and the economy revs back to life, more than half of all states have revived their work search requirements. Arkansas and Louisiana did so months ago in an effort to push workers off their swollen unemployment rolls. Others, like Vermont and Kentucky, have followed in the last few weeks.

 

[…]

 

Business groups say bringing back work search requirements will help juice the labor market and dissuade workers from waiting to return to their old employers or holding out for remote or better-paying jobs.

 

Opponents contend that the mandate keeps undue numbers of Americans from continuing to receive needed benefits because it can be hard to meet the sometimes arduous requirements, including documenting the search efforts. And they say workers may be forced to apply for and accept lower-paying or less-satisfying jobs at a time when the pandemic has caused some to reassess the way they think about their work, their family needs and their prospects.