There’s a college reunion this week. Not an official one; but friends from the same fraternity gathering from around the country to catch up, drink beers and meet the new guys.
It’s a silly thing, of course, but special nonetheless: walking down to the softball field for the student/alumni game; seeing old friends, their kids and wives; watching the young guys in old shirts that have been passed down since you were in school; shaking hands with the old-timers who’ve been coming for decades.
It’s the continuation, really; being part of something older and bigger than yourself, even if just a fraternity. The black-and-white pictures of the gang from the ’50s, the Polaroids from the ’70s and ’80s; stories of ancient hijinks, but also updates on where people are now.
The impact on the active brothers is real, too: seeing older versions of themselves — men who are now lead detectives, senior officers in the Pentagon, or successful in business, law and journalism — who still care enough to come out, and even lend a hand with jobs or advice.
But from March 2020 through August 2021 — 17 long months — the university campus was closed. Barely a semester passed before Omicron panic closed the campus another month. A lot changes in that time.
This weekend, when students and a smattering of alumni come together, it will be the first time they’ve gathered since spring 2019. The only active members who retain any living memory of helping to orchestrate the weekend will now be seniors. They’ve got a good day planned, but the strain of those lost years will show for the simple reason that they didn’t grow up in it. --->READ MORE HERE
It looks like the analytical geniuses over at the San Francisco Fed have finally figured out something that Larry Summers anticipated nearly a year ago: When you pump trillions of dollars of stimulus spending into the economy, it causes inflation to overheat to the highest level in a generation.
Of course, Summers was aggressively poo-poo'd by policy nabobs at Treasury (not to mention the Eccles Building) when he first projected that inflation would likely exceed 5% by the end of 2021 thanks to the federal government's decision to hand out trillions of dollars in stimmies, benefits and PPP loans (combined with the Fed's 'emergency' policy posture that involved backstopping corporate debt and slamming interest rates back down to the zero-bound). While he has since been vindicated, at the time, Summers was nearly excommunicated by his fellow Democrats for having the audacity to suggest that the federal government shouldn't have ridden to the rescue of ordinary people during a once-in-a-century pandemic (or, at the very least, it maybe should have considered a more measured approach).
Now, months after Summers inflationary fears were vindicated, the Fed has finally summoned the courage to acknowledge that maybe the government's balls-to-the-wall COVID stimulus was responsible for stoking the voracious inflationary spiral that - contrary to Jerome Powell's assurances - has been anything but "transitory".
To wit, on Monday, a team of researchers with the SF Fed published a research report illustrating how the US fiscal-policy response is, more than likely, responsible for driving up price pressures.
According to the note, the team set out to answer a question that has plagued economists in recent months: why has inflation been so much more intense in the US than in many of its developed-nation peers? --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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