Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech last Wednesday that the overheated labor market needs to cool more for the Fed to be confident inflation could decrease toward its 2% goal. He said the biggest remaining barrier to taming inflation is a worker shortage, which is driving up wages and, in turn, the cost of goods and services.
“The labor market … shows only tentative signs of rebalancing, and wage growth remains well above levels that would be consistent with 2% inflation,” Powell said. “We want wages to go up strongly, but they’ve got to go up at a level that is consistent with 2% inflation over time.”
How is it business’ fault the Federal government insists, via monetary policy, on paying able-bodied workers not to work with its wealth of welfare payments?
How is it business’ fault the Fed initiated the present high inflation with its own profligate fiscal policy of injecting trillions of dollars into our economy with its artificially suppressed interest rates and its heavy Federal debt funding?
How is it business’ fault that the Federal government and the Fed insist on working at cross purposes in “managing” our economy and fighting inflation instead of letting our erstwhile free market economy—an intrinsically self-correcting economic system—run free and bring that Fed-government-caused inflation under control?
How is it business’ fault that they keep raising wages within their other inflation-caused rising costs so their employees can at least lose inflation-caused value on their wages more slowly?