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Re:US Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943) by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @03:33PM (#40432801)
Let's say the price of everything goes down. And let's say you owe money when it does. Now everything is cheaper (including your labor, because the price of everything went down), but you still owe the same number of dollars. That hurts.

And if you say "wages won't go down", then you're expecting that everything else goes down (including the price of whatever your employer makes), but your wages magically won't? It would be nice... but don't hold your breath.

Re:US Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943) by Etheryte on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @04:20PM (#40433374)
This logic doesn't work. The past few decades have seen steady to strong inflation, while purchasing power after adjusting for inflation, depending on the country, has either not kept up with it or has straight up gone downwards. So in other words, the price of everything has gone up, but not wages. So I don't really see how the price of everything going down would mean wages going down either.
Re:US Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943) by nemomarx on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @09:13PM (#40436295)
When prices rise, we'd expect revenues to rise, which is not necessarily given back to workers in the form of buying power. (See grocery stores having record profits as prices have rised, for instance - that increase in profits is probably in part the gap between prices and wages showing up.)

However, no company is going to do that the other way around - if their revenues fall, they will either cut wages or fire people in order to still be profitable, so deflation should show up faster in loss of buying power too. Companies don't generally just accept lower profits, and shareholders especially do not accept this.

Re:US Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943) by lurking15 on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @04:28PM (#40433468)
but that would only happen under monetary contraction, and the norm now is monetary expansion which siphons off money from savers and redirects it into the pockets of asset holders and "Cantillionaires", and this also means you get paid less with a static wage unless you get raises which for many people is hard unless they're constantly job searching which sucks anyway