Focus on inflation misunderstands affordability fears

By Robert Burgess / Bloomberg Opinion

No matter the economic survey or poll, the message is the same thing: Americans are deeply concerned about what they call an affordability crisis.

Yet to former hedge fund manager and current Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, it’s a joke; literally. Asked what could be done to get Americans feeling better about the economy during recent testimony in the Senate, Bessent quipped that consumers could “turn off MSNBC,” the left-leaning cable news network now called MS NOW. The response drew several loud laughs from those in attendance.

Perhaps Bessent wouldn’t have been so flippant if the testimony had come after the flood of data last week, which laid bare the challenges facing ordinary Americans, especially the rapidly diminishing leverage of workers.

A measure of wages for employees in the private sector rose 3.3% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, the Labor Department’s quarterly Employment Cost Index report showed last Tuesday. It was the smallest increase since early 2021, when the unemployment rate was still well above 6% as the fallout from the covid-19 pandemic lingered.

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That’s a problem for the White House. While it has focused its messaging on inflation stabilizing at just below 3%, the real concern for Americans is that, with slowing wage growth, they feel like they are still behind at a time when jobs are increasingly scarce. Job openings are now the lowest since early 2018 if you don’t count covid-plagued 2020, Labor Department data show. And many economists say openings are probably wildly inflated due to an excess of “phantom” listings that companies have no intention of filling.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-focus-on-inflation-misunderstands-affordability-fears/

Bessent's an asshole. It's what he does.