I don't know that the poor were any better off before the Federal Reserve system; in fact, it made the possibility of monetary rescue even more exclusive.

Part of the reason why the Federal Reserve was formed was because in 1907 J.P. Morgan got his boys' club together and coordinated a financial rescue, but tough luck if you weren't benefitting from that.

Broken window fallacy.

Letting things fail is a possibilty. The boys' club can get together and coordinate a rescue, but in one out of every n attempts of coordinated rescue, they'll fail. Which will be good for leveling income inequality.

That's also how you end up with wars.

No, since 1900 wars are more correlated with inflationary predictors than deflationary predictors.

They're correlated with instability. I'd agree hyper inflation is a cause of instability. 2-3% isn't.

You are making an assertion based on a model that is strictly in your head because it seems "right". Please check your history.

Wars create a lot of debt and inflation is effectively the act of not honoring the debt. It's pretty obvious why inflation follows wars.

Is that because of the existence of the Fed, which only started up in the 1910s?

I wish there was more rigorous discussion of monetary economics - or economics in general. Most people are economically illiterate, and economists are doing a real bad job of teaching it. The most famous ones seem to be constantly on the bleeding edge of whatever semi-verified theory they've pushed for decades without considering that they might be wrong sometimes.

It is undoubtably the working classes who benefit from stability. The people who control businesses are not laying themselves off first, nor are they living paycheck-to-paycheck.

There is quite a lot of reason to doubt that is the case in the long run. What I think dnautics is saying is that stability is trading off short term gains for long term gains. What about the stagnated real wages in the last 50 years? Is that good for the poor? What about seigniorage? Is that good for the poor?

When someone says something like "undoubtedly/obviously X" or "its commen sense that X" 99% of the time they haven't put much thought into it.

We're not comparing equal "short term" and "long term" events though. The short term effects are much more severe in nature. And because they are severe, these "short term" economic effects end up causing long term financial impacts for the people they impact, even after the economy has recovered.

Most non-high income people do not have huge rainy-day funds. If they lose their job, even for a short period of time, they will find themselves relying on debt that is a lot more expensive than 2% inflation.

Stability has a high value, it is just hard to measure in dollars.

> When someone says something like "undoubtedly/obviously X" or "its commen sense that X" 99% of the time they haven't put much thought into it.

Or rather, it's an easy question to answer because we've seen the situation happen many times. Who suffers during economic downturns?

We should probably define what kind of stability we're talking about before we devolve into fisticuffs. Are we talking about a "stable" economy? A stable buying power of the currency? Something else?

I am referring to economic stability.

Well, in a gold-backed world, we had frequent but small bubbles that corrected inefficient economic activity relatively quickly. In a post-gold-backed world, we have less frequent but much much larger bubbles that result in devastating economic crises. Is that really the stability you want?

With modern economic knowledge, technology, and techniques, a gold-backed dollar could be quite a bit more stable than it was in the 1800s, don't you agree? But we don't have to go back to gold to fix this problem. The problem is not gold or not gold. The problem is massive monetary inflation. That can be solved without going back to gold backing. What gold-backing did was create a culture that believed in a limited money supply. When we destroyed that culture, we created the problem.

Has it not occurred to you that it's precisely the modern economic knowledge, technology and techniques that have driven us away from gold backed dollars or trying to fix the money supply (and float the interest rate or crash the banks)? I mean, macroeconomists have spent the majority of the last century proposing and carrying out natural experiments on different monetary policies: if they've moved from being almost universally in favour of the Gold Standard to almost universally against it, that's not evidence that what we've actually learned is how to make a Gold Standard work.

And no, our post-gold standard economic crises have not been proportionally more devastating than the Great Depression, or taken as long to rectify as the Long Depression, and I don't long for that kind of "stability"

> Has it not occurred to you that it's precisely the modern economic knowledge, technology and techniques that have driven us away from gold backed dollars

It hasn't because its patently false. Both the gold confiscation in 1931 and cutting the cord of gold-backing in 1971 were both done as desparately rushed moves to reneg on the governments promise to uphold the value of the dollar. These weren't thoughtful reasoned well discussed actions. It had nothing to do with technology or best practices. It was a purely a politically expedient way to prevent collapse of an insolvent dollar.

> macroeconomists have spent the majority of the last century proposing and carrying out natural experiments

You don't run experiments in macroeconomics. Controls are impossible. And studies have so many confounding variables that any conclusions we come to are many orders of magnitude less certain than anything in the hard sciences.

> our post-gold standard economic crises have not been proportionally more devastating than the Great Depression

You must have misunderstood me. I never said any such thing.

Iirc our post gold standard crises have been nominally at least near as bad as the great depression. Of course we have much,much better infrastructure, healthcare, communication, etc, which economists tend not to take into account for how there aren't a starving people dying in the streets. None of that matters, it's all the stewardship of the fed.

I'd love to see that analysis if you can find the source.

> It hasn't because its patently false. Both the gold confiscation in 1931 and cutting the cord of gold-backing in 1971 were both done as desparately rushed moves to reneg on the governments promise to uphold the value of the dollar. These weren't thoughtful reasoned well discussed actions. It had nothing to do with technology or best practices. It was a purely a politically expedient way to prevent collapse of an insolvent dollar.

I take it you haven't read any mainstream macroeconomic analysis written over the course of the past century, the theory, analytical techniques and predictions which informs modern central banking practices. I have. It is certainly not patently false to suggest that there has been plenty of discussion and implementation of newer ideas, an enormous amount of focus on the dynamic of inflation, and the result is very few economists seeing any sense in the notion that the optimum quantity of money to support the growth of the United States happens to coincide with fluctuations in world gold output.

But even aside from the actual theory and techniques, part of the knowledge base is simply concluding that if it was necessary break a system to prevent the collapse of an insolvent dollar, it is probably best not to attempt to recreate that state of economic affairs.

> You don't run experiments in macroeconomics. Controls are impossible. And studies have so many confounding variables that any conclusions we come to are many orders of magnitude less certain than anything in the hard sciences.

We agree it's not a hard science, and that natural experiments are very difficult (they are especially difficult when a proposal like "maybe we should try to ensure a particular USD aggregate stays at a certain level, and raise interest rates as high as necessary to keep it at that level" results in mass unemployment. When "maybe we should fix the interest rates instead" turns out to result in inflation remaining within predictable ranges for the next three decades, it is even harder to recommend the former policy). Similarly, if the Gold Standard fails to deliver the stability it promises, and then its vociferous minority of advocates promise hyperinflation is around the corner every year for decades without ever being right, new theories which accurately predict inflation take over.

> I never said any such thing.

I may have misunderstood you. If we agree that the Great Depression and Long Depression were examples of significant economic crises in addition to periodic smaller financial panics and forced devaluations, we agree. I see that as a pretty good indication our current financial crises are less worse, especially given our current policy framework gives us tools other than "wait it out" to ameliorate the suffering.

> It is certainly not patently false to suggest that there has been plenty of discussion and implementation of newer ideas, an enormous amount of focus on the dynamic of inflation...

Ok. I agree with all of that. And none of it contracts what I said, which was that modern economic knowledge did not "drive us away from gold backed dollars". What drove us off the gold standard was rash actions by a federal government backed into a corner.

> if it was necessary break a system to prevent the collapse of an insolvent dollar, it is probably best not to attempt to recreate that state of economic affairs

Well, that conclusion conflates the solution with the problem. For example, if you're in an airplane and you recklessly burn all your fuel because you were having fun going fast and have to eject and abandon your plane to crash, the solution is not "bring more fuel next time" nor "don't use planes anymore". The answer is don't be an idiot and reckelessly burn all your fuel.

> If we agree that the Great Depression and Long Depression were examples of significant economic crises in addition to periodic smaller financial panics and forced devaluation

I think I agree with that.

I just don't agree that either of those depressions were caused because gold-backed currency isn't sound. In fact, before the Long Depression, we used gold backed currency. What caused the Long Depression was stupidly removing silver from the monetary supply very suddenly. That was an enormous shock to the economy that happened without enough warning. It was a monetary cliff, and cliffs are bad. Engineering transitions like that to be smooth and slow is the way to avoid that.

And the Great Depression was caused because banks lent out too much money and since the Federal Reserve had driven out all the private clearing houses and refused to act as lender of last resort. Bank runs contracted the money supply by 33%. Not sure how much that is in comparison to the Long Depression, but its a lot regardless.

> What drove us off the gold standard was rash actions by a federal government backed into a corner.

What drove us off the gold standard was that the gold standard backed the government into a corner, yes. What drove essentially all macroeconomists to conclude that this was the correct one was new theory about why this had happened, the economic possibilities of this new theory, the new theory turning out to allowing finer control over price stability than the Gold Standard had ever done and the woeful quality of the analysis of the few economists still defending the gold standard.

> For example, if you're in an airplane and you recklessly burn all your fuel because you were having fun going fast and have to eject and abandon your plane to crash, the solution is not "bring more fuel next time" nor "don't use planes anymore".

"Bring more fuel" sounds like a much better solution to fuel-shortage induced aircraft accidents than slowing down to me, and I'm confident that aircraft investigators agree with me.

Assuming that the real problem with running out of fuel isn't the quantity of fuel but that jets aren't limited to early 1900s speeds and engine technologies sounds like a pretty apt analogy for calls to return to a Gold Standard, actually...

> What caused the Long Depression was stupidly removing silver from the monetary supply very suddenly. That was an enormous shock to the economy that happened without enough warning. It was a monetary cliff, and cliffs are bad. Engineering transitions like that to be smooth and slow is the way to avoid that.

I think we can agree on that (though the reason it was removed is because the bimetallic standards with dollars redeemed in fixed quantities for commodities whose actual value ratio fluctuated were absurd). For related reasons, we decided monetary cliffs generated by metallic standards were worse than having an elastic monetary supply. The Great Depression was caused because the Fed could not print enough money to act as the lender of last resort. Again, a situation we seek to avoid by having the actual quantity of money determined by the amount of credit supplied and demanded by the market, rather than simply hoping gold reserves would automagically align with it.

> The Great Depression was caused because the Fed could not print enough money to act as the lender of last resort.

Not true. I'll quote from https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-depressio...

"One reason that Congress created the Federal Reserve, of course, was to act as a lender of last resort. Why did the Federal Reserve fail in this fundamental task? The Federal Reserve’s leaders disagreed about the best response to banking crises. Some governors subscribed to a doctrine similar to Bagehot’s dictum, which says that during financial panics, central banks should loan funds to solvent financial institutions beset by runs. Other governors subscribed to a doctrine known as real bills."

I've never seen any source other than you say that the great depression was caused because the Fed couldn't create money.

> Most non-high income people do not have huge rainy-day funds.

Why do you suppose that is? See, the system protects itself.

Because the cost of living is set by what other people spend. If I earn $3k a month and my neighbor earns $3k a month, and I want to save $300, I only have $2700 to spend. My neighbor can offer more for limited resources (housing), and thus I can only save if I don't have to pay for that housing.

Those same people did not have large rainy-day funds pre-1970's either. Poor people have always spent most of their money.

You're evading the point. The savings rate has gone down since then. Today the middle class has no savings, not just the poor

Attributing that to any one thing requires a large amount of evidence. For example, Americans spend a much larger percentage of their income on housing than they did in the past.[1] House prices vary wildly based on local because of demand and local legislation that affects how and what can be built. How much of that is because of increased housing cost, and how much of increased housing cost is because of monetary policy which is national and not local conditions, when prices vary so much by locale?

If you're trying to make a case that the middle class has less savings because of reasons other than that, it seems prudent to at least explain that away.

1: https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...

Housing is one of the _very_ few ways a peasant can leverage debt beyond his means to hedge against inflation.

There's no other way I could take out a loan for > $100k to buy an asset. Since leveraging dollar debts to assets is the only sane thing to do in an inflationary regime, it's no surprise that housing has become ridiculously overpriced.

Buying a house is the only way an average person can utilize financial techniques of the wealthy. Namely leveraging dollar debts against an inflationary hedge.

And the rise in housing prices is a bubble created by monetary inflation. Asset prices increase first when money is created. Houses are one of the many safe havens that people put their money into when the economy has poor investment and savings options. Monetary inflation also fuels cheap loans that inflate these assets and get people into long term debt obligations - because money is largely created by giving out loans. This is all part of the same problem.

> And the rise in housing prices is a bubble created by monetary inflation.

That doesn't account for the vast difference in price based on locale. Inflation is not locale based, but housing prices definitely are.

I don't doubt that monetary policy affects housing, because it makes it easier to get loans which will affect demand, and thus pricing, but it's not the whole story, and may not even be half the story depending on the area. For example, another thing that affected demand is urbanization. But, interestingly, the rate of urbanization seems to have decreased since the 1970s (and in some regions actually regressed in the 1970 in total, not in rate of change).[1]

I think this needs to be accounted for in any coherent theory that tries to link monetary policy to lack of savings now compared to the past, when we already know that housing prices have risen much faster but that housing prices are also extremely locale based, which monetary policy isn't.

Ultimately, while I think monetary is powerful in how it affects myriad things, I think we would be remiss to use it as an explanation for everything just because it's easy to point to. Most things are far more complex than that and have many inputs that affect them, and without careful examination we can't be sure if monetary policy was the majority of the reason, or even the primary reason.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...

>Monetary inflation also fuels cheap loans that inflate these assets and get people into long term debt obligations

You're forgetting something extremely important here. It's the savings that are fueling cheap loans. Those savings force the Fed to lower interest rates. It's not the Fed that is making this decision, it's the market collectively deciding that depositing money and lending it out is the best use of their money and those savings have to go somewhere.

Before 2008 those savings were flooding into mortgage bonds and banks ran out of mortgages to sell so they just took subprime mortgages and got the rating agencies to lie for them. All for that sweet sweet commission.

> It's the savings that are fueling cheap loans

What? I don't think that's at all true.

> the market collectively deciding that depositing money and lending it out is the best use of their money

I don't think anyone thinks that earning bank interest is the best use of their money. Interest is basically 0. In some countries you have to pay to hold deposits in banks.

> those savings have to go somewhere

They actually don't. We could legislate 100% reserve requirements for example, instead of the 0% we have today.

> Before 2008 those savings were flooding into mortgage bonds

I think you're misunderstand how banks operate these days. Banks no longer lend out proportional to the deposits they get, banks lend out as much as they can without any limit. The amount people are saving is literally irrelevant at this point. It was already basically irrelevant in 2000. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/epr/02v08n1/0205benn/020...

There's 4 major things that happened in the 70s that affected wages, and everyone blames the one they'd like to based on their ideology.

1. Closing the gold window

2. Outsourcing of manufacturing begins in earnest (combined with weakening of unions, the Clean Air and Water Acts, etc)

3. Computers really start taking over (obviously accelerates in the 80s)

4. Women started having real careers on a large scale

1. Closing the gold window

Inflation benefits those that can leverage dollar denominated debts against inflationary hedges. Wealthy people with assets undoubtably can do this at a grand scale while the closest thing an average person can do is buy a house.

2. Outsourcing of manufacturing begins in earnest (combined with weakening of unions, the Clean Air and Water Acts, etc)

Yes, and maybe slower globalization would have been better, but I personally am a free market all the way guy.

3. Computers really start taking over (obviously accelerates in the 80s)

This is akin to making the `pie` that is the economy greater. It does does not explain why the wealthy gained most of the new growth of said `pie`.

4. Women started having real careers on a large scale

I'm a bit torn on this as an argument. Women having careers should have increased the size of the economic `pie` and everyone should have been better off, but what seems to have happened is that competition between laborers became more intense and while the `pie` grew, the average person lost a significant portion of their share.

I have yet to fully wrap my head around this one, but it seems like labor competition combined with corporate and or governmental control in a way that prevented the distribution of the increased productivity?

> 3. Computers really start taking over (obviously accelerates in the 80s)

> This is akin to making the `pie` that is the economy greater. It does does not explain why the wealthy gained most of the new growth of said `pie`.

Sure it does. The productivity gains from any tool are a direct monetary benefit to those who implement it. The pie is only subsequently redistributed if other market effects coerce the original beneficiary into doing so.

Record-keepers, secretaries, etc, being laid off from their job obviously have no opportunity to negotiate for higher wages as a result of that productivity gain. The only people who were in a position to negotiate were the ones who could implement these new tools. And they did: tech jobs are well paid.

You've missed massive oil price shocks, the least controversial and most quantifiable.

It's also notable how many of the wage effects really took off in the 1980s, when there were a lot more dramatic policy shifts.

How does inflation suck money from the poor? That is, the ones who are most likely to have loans that will be reduced by that very same inflationary policy.

> How does inflation suck money from the poor? That is, the ones who are most likely to have loans...

why the hell is this still a belief? The indebted poor have revolving credit at best (think 10%-ish APR) or short-term credit (payday loans: 15%+ APR). Inflation does not help those situations.

The wealthy are benefitting from low-interest rate loans (margin accounts, leveraged trading, options) that are enabled by the existence of inflation, and by the mechanism, which is providing a discount window to banks (so they ride on nominal gains and are insulated from real devaluation).

Consider someone who is spending 95% of their income on day to day expenses, and we have a 1% increase in prices. Now you are spending 96% of your income on day to day expenses, which is a 20% decrease in margin of safety. It's even worse if you start at 99%.

If you are spending 20% of your income on day to day expenses and have a 1% increase in prices, your margin of safety loss is < 2%.

"But wages catch up" you say. No they don't. Otherwise inflation as a policy doesn't work.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...

"in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts."

Inflation is a stealth wage cut, a matter of policy for cheating the labor class. Don't get me wrong, it's well intentioned - it's to prop up the low unemployment metric, but Goodheart's law applies.

Finally, inflation forces the middle class to invest instead of save, to stay afloat and build up a retirement nest egg. Investments typically must go through approved channels, e.g. "the stock market" which disproportionately favors the already wealthy, e.g. CEOs, investment managers, hedge funds.

Thus it is a siphon that steals wealth from the poor and middle class and gives it to the wealthy.

> The indebted poor have revolving credit at best (think 10%-ish APR) or short-term credit (payday loans: 15%+ APR). Inflation does not help those situations

Forcing down inflation raises interest rates, and lower interest rates help the significantly indebted a lot. Interest is literally a siphon that takes wealth from people that are earning it and gives it to those who already had it. And the debt to wealth ratio of the bottom wealth decile of the UK is 3:1

The debt to wealth ratio of the top wealth decile is, obviously, a lot smaller. They might borrow when it's tax efficient to do so, but they don't need to. Also lower interest rates actually reduce the returns they're getting on lending their money. Sure, low interest rates don't hurt their property portfolios, and are fantastic for people becoming rich by starting companies that burn through a lot of borrowed cash (and create jobs), but in general interest is a subsidy for the rich.

Forcing down inflation requires raising interest rates as a policy, yes, and that will result in people offering LESS revolving credit, which will decrease the net flow of the siphon. But seriously if you think 2% inflation helps out your credit card at 10% APR... Maybe you should start maxing out your credit card?

> The debt to wealth ratio of the top wealth decile is, obviously, a lot smaller

That's not obvious to me. Donald Trump is probably in very poor shape debt-to-wealth-wise relative to myself. The unbanked in the US are doing literally infinitely better debt-to-wealth-wise than I am.

Anyways, you are strictly thinking of personal debt. There is institutional debt that the wealthiest have either indirect access to, or benefit disproportionately from, for example corporate debt, if you are in the C-suite, or municipal debt, if you own a firm that is frequently obtaining grants to do stuff, or literally banks, if you are a major shareholder in banks, financial instruments that require low-interest debt, if you participate in a hedge fund, etc.

> "But wages catch up" you say. No they don't.

They did until a series of fiscal policy (tax and spending) changes in the 1970s and 1980s (including the massive Reagan tax burden shift onto workers) put the kibosh on it. Since then, not so much, but that’s not a monetary policy issue, insofar as those two things have been artificially segmented.

> Inflation is a stealth wage cut, a matter of policy for cheating the labor class.

You are misunderstanding the Krugman quote. The value he is citing is that as there are demand shifts in the economy, inflation allows small short-term real wage cuts in segments of the economy seeing decreased demand and therefore profitability without reducing nominal wages (whumich tend to be sticky), reducing resort to job cuts as a response, providing a buffer between short-term fluctuations and unemployment.

Krugman is not saying that inflation enables long-term, general real wage cuts to be more easily implemented or that it would be good for it to do so.

> Finally, inflation forces the middle class to invest instead of save

The middle and upper class are, by definition the clases with substantial dependence on the returns from productive capital. Inflation doesn't force the moddle class to invest in capital, substantial investment in capital while still having a dependency on your labor is what defines being middle class. You can choose not to invest in capital, whether by stuffing money in a mattress or blowing it on hookers and blackjack, but if you do that you aren’t middle class.

> Thus it is a siphon that steals wealth from the poor and middle class and gives it to the wealthy.

No, the siphon that does that is the series of tax burden shifts adopted over the last several decades with the express design of rewarding/encouraging the wealthy (often euphemized as “job creators”).

> Krugman is not saying that inflation enables long-term, general real wage cuts to be more easily implemented or that it would be good for it to do so.

You're right, that's not what he's saying. That doesn't mean it's not happening.

Fact of the matter is that we can't decouple the "shifting of the tax burden" from the detachment of the dollar. However, we will soon find out. Biden is shifting the tax burden back, and we're gonna get inflation. My prediction is that in 10 years the lower and middle classes are going to be absolutely reamed by both of these and the upper class will be unscathed or even richer (lower class due to inflation directly and middle class due to bracket creep + taxes intended for the wealthy). Your prediction should be that income inequality will be ameliorated. We'll see who is correct.

>The wealthy are benefitting from low-interest rate loans (margin accounts, leveraged trading, options) that are enabled by the existence of inflation,

Low interest rate loans exist because of low inflation. If there was high inflation and full employment those rates would go up very quickly.

>Consider someone who is spending 95% of their income on day to day expenses, and we have a 1% increase in prices. Now you are spending 96% of your income on day to day expenses, which is a 20% decrease in margin of safety. It's even worse if you start at 99%.

Your employer also has now room to pay you 1% higher wages.

>"But wages catch up" you say. No they don't. Otherwise inflation as a policy doesn't work.

They do with full employment. Inflation only exists to erode the value of income earned in the past to encourage investment. To make sure those investments pay off, inflation also raises future incomes.

>Inflation is a stealth wage cut, a matter of policy for cheating the labor class. Don't get me wrong, it's well intentioned - it's to prop up the low unemployment metric, but Goodheart's law applies.

It's a hack to get to full employment. Once you have full employment workers can negotiate for increases that catch up with productivity, which today would go well above the current inflation rate.

>Finally, inflation forces the middle class to invest instead of save, to stay afloat and build up a retirement nest egg. Investments typically must go through approved channels, e.g. "the stock market" which disproportionately favors the already wealthy, e.g. CEOs, investment managers, hedge funds.

If the USD in your bank account don't represent wealth in the physical world they are effectively worthless. You're also forgetting that those investments will create jobs and some of those jobs are middle class jobs.

>Thus it is a siphon that steals wealth from the poor and middle class and gives it to the wealthy.

Ok, tell me your magic solution to achieve full employment and letting wages catch up with productivity.

> Finally, inflation forces the middle class to invest instead of save, to stay afloat and build up a retirement nest egg. Investments typically must go through approved channels, e.g. "the stock market" which disproportionately favors the already wealthy, e.g. CEOs, investment managers, hedge funds.

If only there was some common investment vehicle, a 'shelter,' if you will, that could shelter you from inflation while simultaneously sheltering you from the elements?

Its called Seigniorage. The people and businesses closest to the money creation gain more from the creation of the money. That's because when new money is first used, prices haven't accounted for it yet. It takes a lot of time for that to happen. So by the time that money has trickled down to the masses, prices have inflated to account.

Not only that, but that money is very often used to fuel government debt, which only leads to paying more money later down the line. Debt rises faster than inflation dilutes the money supply, so its simply not true that we can simply print enough money to devalue our debt. The more money we print, the more in debt we'll collectively be.

To a degree you have to have something to put up to have a loan in the first place.

The finances of some freshly minted doctor loaded with medical school debt look a lot different than an unbanked poor person who's never qualified for credit.

> To a degree you have to have something to put up to have a loan in the first place.

Dollar denominated debt doesn’t all originate with getting credit-check-qualified approval for a loan.

The rich have large leveraged loans, mortgages, and lots of assets - ideally situated to benefit from inflation and are not impacted by the price of food or rents.

In contrast the poor typically have small loans, rents and rely on wage inflation, which usually trails price inflation by some way.