If the administration pressures the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates, say, right before November 2026, then we lock in a stagflationary cycle. An initial stock rally then long-term bond yields rising on inflation fears. A weakening U.S. dollar, and a Federal Reserve that has no tools to fight inflation in the medium-term.
People love to bring up the gold chart and be like "what happened in the 1970s!". It wasn't ending the gold standard that was the problem. It was the endless deficit spending; if you want to get a handle on inflation you need current demand to match current production.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
The central bank raises interest rates, until there are enough bankrupcies and unemployment rate reaches a high enough level, The economy cools down.
The nation has low inflation again.
Rinse out and repeat.
They do the direct opposite of bailing anyone out.
Now the US is different. The Biden administration decided that the best way to fight inflation was to invent a giant pile og money and hand it out.
Which heats up the economy and should raise inflation .
Biden did not invent quantitative easing.
Can you provide some references for your claim? IIRC, under Biden, inflation was stoked by the Covid stimulus(arguably necessary to avoid rapid deflation due to Covid, but probably kept for too long) and the Fed moved pretty decisively in the second half of the Biden presidency to raise interest rates rapidly to combat inflation. FWIW, the inflation issue seemed to be under control and heading in the right direction before the administration changed.
I think you answered your own question.
Yes, interest rates?
Even Arizona Iced Tea had to come off their $0.99 price tag.
Everyone in America is hard-pressed to find anything for sale for at or under $1.00
Minimum wage is still federally $7.25.
How much worse does it actually have to get to be official stagflation?
If inflation (or some other shock) caused growth to head towards 0 with unemployment going above ~4% I believe economists would say it was a stagflation try period
They’re ready.
I used to be able to withdraw at least $500, now in a single transaction I can only withdraw $200 max. Given that inflation has gone so far the opposite direction, it's wild to me to see such low low maximum withdrawals.
Only time I pull out $20s is emergency money for gas station, since for whatever reason they won't take large bills.
Most things you described is inflation, not stagflation. The point about the minimum wage is a red herring because virtually nobody gets paid the federal minimum wage. Moreover contrary to many people believe, inflation has not been outpacing wage growth in the US:
Arizona Iced Tea price increases would be due to 50% aluminum tariffs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/business/arizon-iced-tea-... | https://archive.today/HOsps
> How much worse does it actually have to get to be official stagflation?
Steve Eisman: U.S. Consumers Are Collapsing: Cars, Credit, & the Chaos Ahead [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492807 - October 2025
* 69% of the US population are living paycheck to paycheck
* 25% of American consumers are using BNPL (buy now pay later) to pay for groceries
What breaks the camel's back? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is not out of any kind of financial necessity. It is a lifestyle choice.
Report: https://lisep.org/mql | https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/63ba0d84fe573c7513595d6e/...
> One commonly used (though also criticized) benchmark for housing affordability is that no more than 30% of household income should go toward housing costs. Households that spend more than that are considered “cost burdened” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By that standard, 31.3% of American households were cost burdened in 2023, including 27.1% of households with a mortgage and 49.7% of households that rent, according to 1-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). (Many more people own than rent: In the second quarter of 2024, 65.6% of occupied housing units were owned while 34.4% were rented, according to the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey.)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at...
And a Big Mac meal at McDonald's is $8.00.
A couple of years ago my wife and I stopped there to get a meal on the road (there was really not much else to choose from) and when the total for the two of us was over $20 I actually did a double take and said "there must be some mistake, it's just two meals" but that was the cost. Haven't eaten there since.
Everyone keeps saying this, but then go and re-elect the same do nothings.
Congress is also still free to override the Fed and make their own programs or change the operation of the Fed too.
We saw similar during the great depression, in that people couldn't find full time work, so they did gig jobs, quickly undercutting other laborers until wages cratered and it was a full blown depression. I suspect that gig work, even 1 hour/week is enough to get you out of the unemployed group, but it isn't sufficient and is masking the true labor market and unemployment. And then there is the Federal government firing the statisticians because the numbers coming out don't look good and now we can't trust the numbers. At this point any number you must assume to be majorly inflated from reality. Those made up numbers aren't even good.
I recommend "Applied Panel Data Analysis for Economic and Social Surveys" by Hans-Jürgen Andreß, Katrin Golsch, Alexander W. Schmidt, if you would like to learn more.
It is trending up but is still lower than pretty much any time since the 2008 recession: https://unemploymentdata.com/current-u6-unemployment-rate/
Millennials have spent most of their careers systematically underemployed.
https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/03/overview-o...
AftHurrahWinch•1h ago