ok some caveats: i'm not an economist and i'm also pretty dumb and get my information almost exclusively from either leftist podcasts or just by talking to my neolib friends but
aren't you conflating supply chain problems with macro economic conditions? even larry summers has pulled back from his whole overheating comments. pulling the 2T lever during peacetime scares people but it just means you have to monitor more closely, right? if you've got your foot on teh accelerator you just gotta be paying attention at the fed, checking both lanes and the rear view mirror with interest rates? feels like we've shown that the phillips curve is broken as hell in this economy. it costs less than ever to service our debts, right? money is cheap. should do it to the tune of $15T over the next decade to stop the world from boiling to death.
my big concern hasn't really been mentioned here, which is the gig economy and automation. are we still going to be scared of minor inflationary effects when UBI becomes utterly unavoidable? feels like we need more smart people talking about that at Labor. the minimum wage thing is kind of a no brainer. make a cutoff for small biz size so it doesn't crush them, force big businesses to pay more, accept burgers cost $0.10 more, and let's lift another 10 mm out of poverty. but what happens when we lose truck drivers and cashiers and security etc etc.
Your last paragraph falls outside the scope of what ATS and I are focusing on.
We're both looking at the next year or two. There are absolutely supply chain problems, but that doesn't mean that you can't have a co-mingled problem.
You can exert pressure from both sides of the market. A 2x4 costs ~$0.25/ft. in "normal" conditions. If you add a pandemic, which removes the vast majority of supply of 2x4's, the price jumps to ~$1.00/ft. Then you give everyone in the Country $2,000 and they want to build a deck. Well, now that motherfucker is ~$2.00/ft and oh my fucking god, the weekend warrior is now seriously impacting the ability for large-scale contractors to effectively build housing.
It's happening in that sector right now, and you have a collision of shit causing a lot of problems. The cheap money typically leads to people buying houses (low interest rates r gud). However, we're straight up running out of houses for peoople to move in to. The GSO area typically has something like 4,000 SFH's on the market at any given time. We're in a world where that's more like 40 at any given time right now. Same thing as the 2x4 - demand is out-stripping supply. But then you've also got the added problem of Rufus - my 60-something buddy who wants to build a house, but won't put his house on the market, because lumber prices are too high to build a new home. So those inflationary bubbles start to merge.
Couple that with my most-often-used HVAC contractor being STRAIGHT FUCKED. All of his best techs have been fired or won't come back from a layoff because they are slaying it in unemployment. So he's dicking around with garbage techs that - I shit you not - have come back over 20 times to the last job they did for me (typically, new SFH should have 4 maybe 5 HVAC visits). Stack on top of that a totally wild problem getting new/replacement HVAC parts that are totally fucking random. Register vents? We have 123124,42,35435463 of them. Motherboards for furnaces? We have negative 234249328 of them and we're backordered so deep in the ass that you'd better consider fucking geothermal.
It's cool to say, "awww...yeah, macro economic policy and shit," but the economy is usually an ocean, but right now it is acting like a fucking four year old in a bathtub sloshing fucking water on the ceiling.
