What is inflation? How did it happen? What are the dangers? These are all questions Local 4′s Rod Meloni aims to answer
We’ve all experienced the inflation that’s gripped out economy. It’s frustrating, especially when we were told early on that it was going to come and go quickly.
A grocery story and the gas station are all places where you’ll find inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation is up more than 6% for food, almost that for clothing and 29% for energy.
Inflation: a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money.
Michigan residents should be concerned about those numbers. New cars are up to 12% year to year. Used cars are up 37% and gasoline is up 50% -- but that’s on average.
AAA Michigan is showing that gasoline prices went from $2.26 this time last year to $3.22 this year. That’s a 70% jump.
Michigan economist Patrick Anderson said you can lay the blame largely at the feet of Washington where printing money became a genuine past time as COVID took hold.
“We’ve been increasing the money supply dramatically for three years the recession we had a pandemic with the lockdowns was over a year and a half ago. We should have stopped doing that there were people who arened against it and we kept doing it thus producing all this money,” Anderson said.
Anderson said people in Michigan have long memories about what happens when interest rates start ticking upward. Hard times could easily be on the horizon.
“People in Michigan here that are thinking about whether they should buy a house or not they need to look at those interest rates really carefully because this kind of inflation is gonna hit mortgage rates and it’s gonna hit housing prices,” Anderson said.