4 charts that explain the economic rollercoaster of the past year
This confluence of factors, both tangible and psychological, created an unusual scenario where people didn’t rush into available jobs. Currently, there are 6.9 million unemployed Americans, but there are 11 million job openings, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A rising number of workers quit in the second half of 2021, hitting a record 4.4 million people, or 3% of workers, in September.
Inflation has stemmed largely from tight supply chains and high consumer demand. Labor shortages haven’t been the main cause for inflation, experts say, but they aren’t exactly helping the problem, either. Indeed, manufacturing, transport and wholesale industries are all paying more to hire and retain workers and certainly some of those costs are getting passed down the line to the consumer.
Prices for goods and services are running so high that they are wiping out wage gains. Wages and salaries for private industry workers as measured by the Employment Cost Index were rising about 3% a year prior to the pandemic. They were up 4.6% for the 12-month period ending Sept. 2021. But U.S. inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, has topped 5% annual increases every month since June, which means that the price increases have eaten into the salary gains for much of the year.
“The Fed expected inflation to come back down much more rapidly,” says Narayana Kocherlakota, an economics professor at the University of Rochester who previously served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “The forces that we’re seeing on inflation are more persistent than were expected a year ago.”
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