Shadowing Practice: The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Right now, everyone's blaming inflation on the Middle East.
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That's the narrative we're being told and everyone's accepted it.
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And it makes sense why.
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It's easy to follow.
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There's a clean cause and a clean effect.
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It's so simple you can draw it on a napkin.
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Except there's one problem with this story.
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The Federal Reserve keeps its own inflation scoreboard.
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They don't use the number you see in the headlines.
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They target 2% inflation measured by personal consumption expenditures, the PCE.
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That's the scoreboard that counts.
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That's also where the mainstream story falls apart.
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The conflict in the Middle East started in February, just five months ago, but the Federal Reserve's measure has now missed the inflation target for 63 months in a row,
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more than five years straight.
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The PCE currently sits at a little over 4%, more than double the Fed's target, and is continuing to climb,
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so everyone's using a five-month-old story to diagnose a five-year-old problem.
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And this isn't just a number that only matters to economists.
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This single number lies at the foundation of every economic decision in the United States, And every rate you pay is priced off what people expect that number to be.
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Your mortgage, your car loan, what your savings account pays you, what the cash in your wallet is worth next year.
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So it's worth asking, what's actually going on?
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Because there's clearly more to the inflation story.
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Inflation in this country used to move like a pendulum.
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It would swing up, swing back down, and eventually come to rest around that 2% number.
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You never questioned it, because you never had to.
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even had a name for this period of American history, the Great Moderation.
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From 1985 to 2007, growth was steady, inflation was low, and the whole economy looked like it regulated itself.
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Except it didn't.
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There was no invisible hand.
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There was a real one, someone standing beside the pendulum, giving it a firm push back toward the middle every single time it swung too far,
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done so reliably for so long that everyone forgot the pendulum was being pushed at all.
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That's what the last five years are actually about.
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The thing doing the pushing is now the one in trouble.
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But before we get there, we need to look closer at that 2% number itself.
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For a number the entire financial system is anchored to, you'd assume it fell out of some impossibly complex math equation,
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or it was carved in stone and passed down generations.
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Well, neither.
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Somebody chose it.
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So why the 2%?
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Here's St. Louis Federal Reserve economist Christopher Neely explaining how they landed on that 2% target number.
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When central banks were considering what sort of an inflation rate to target,
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they were really trading off the costs of having inflation with the benefits of having some upward movement in prices,
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which might have benefits in terms of allowing central banks to stabilize the macroeconomy.
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So 2% was kind of a happy medium.
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So while the target number itself may have come from an arbitrary decision, there's still reasoning behind it.
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But why not go lower?
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Why not go to zero?
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That's the obvious question.
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If inflation's the thing quietly making everything more expensive, why aim for any of it at all?
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Because while on paper, a zero percent inflation rate sounds great, in reality, it's not.
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When a recession hits, the Fed's main move is to cut interest rates.
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In a world with zero inflation, rates already sit near the floor.
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So the second a real economic downturn arrives, the Fed gets one cut, maybe two, and then slams into zero, structurally trapped and out of road.
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That's how an ordinary recession can spiral into a decade-long depression.
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But you can't aim too high either.
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Push it to 4%, and prices double every 18 years.
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Businesses can't forecast their cost, and nobody can price a long-term contract without guessing.
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So 2% is that Goldilocks number, high enough to keep a cushion between the economy and catastrophe, low enough that you barely notice it on an ordinary Tuesday.
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But actually hitting that number, year after year, is close to impossible.
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It takes a balancing act so unforgiving, it would make Evel Knievel sweat.
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And for the last few decades, the Fed made this balancing act look effortless.
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We're just now finding out how easy it was, now that things have changed.
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But before I get into that, a quick pause.
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Now back to the Federal Reserve's World Class Balancing Act.
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For the last few decades, we managed to control inflation.
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The walk towards the 2% target looked effortless.
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But it only looked effortless because the tightrope was 6 inches off the ground.
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And the only reason we know that is because we've seen what the same walk looks like 60 feet up.
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But I'm trying to be a more positive guy these days.
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So before I show you the ugly, let me show you the good part.
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Back when the Feds still had room to work with.
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Let's rewind to the late 70s.
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Inflation wasn't drifting anymore.
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It was sprinting.
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It peaked at over 13.5%.
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At that pace, prices double in about nine years.
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The dollar in your pocket was rotting while you held it, and every single person could feel it happening.
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So who do you call when inflation is out of control?
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No. Not Ghostbusters.
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You call 6'7", cigar-smoking Paul Volcker, the kind of man who looks like he eats recessions for breakfast.
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Volcker takes over as Fed chair in 1979 and does the one thing nobody else had the stomach for.
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He drives interest rates to 20%.
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He deliberately triggers not one recession, but two, back to back, strangling the money supply until inflation has nothing left to feed on.
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It was so aggressive, it earned a name of its own, the Volcker Shock.
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And it worked.
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Inflation went from over 13.5% down to bottoming out under 2% in the late 80s.
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So take a look at the timeline.
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From 1980 to 1983, Volcker tightens monetary policy aggressively, triggers two back to back recessions and successfully drops inflation by more than 10 points.
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Two years later, the United States enters the Great Moderation Era, a 23-year-long period defined by steady growth and historically low economic volatility.
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Which raises the obvious question, the one probably forming in your head right now, if it worked for Volcker, why can't the Fed just run the same playbook again today?
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It's because he had one advantage nobody talks about, the country could absorb the damage.
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When Volcker first claimed the throne, the national debt was about a quarter the size of the economy.
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By today's standards, pretty much nothing.
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So when he drove rates to 20%, it was brutal, but it was clean.
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Raising rates did the one thing he intended it to do, slam the brakes.
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But that world is gone.
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The national debt is now sitting around 100% of GDP, a one-to-one match with the entire economy.
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The last time it was this high was the Second World War, but the number is only half of it.
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The other half is what the number does.
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When the Fed raises rates now, it presses down in two places at once.
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The first is the breaks.
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Higher rates, pricier loans, less borrowing and a slower economy.
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Simple.
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The second is hidden underneath and quietly emerges by accident.
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Higher rates also mean the government pays more interest on what it already owes.
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And that bill is not small.
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Net interest is running around a trillion dollars a year, more than the entire military budget.
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In 2021, interest ate about 9% of every dollar the federal government collected.
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This year, it's 19%.
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But those interest payments don't just vanish from the economy.
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It lands in the hands of the pension funds, banks, foreign governments, and other investors who lent the US government money in the first place.
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So every time the Fed raises rates to cool the economy down, it also raises the size of the check that gets written and paid out, which then gets spent, lended out,
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or rolled into the next bond at the new higher rate.
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Which basically means the same move that's supposed to pull money out of the economy starts quietly sending it back in.
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So one foot presses the brake, the other one quietly presses the gas.
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And the heavier the debt, the harder that second foot pushes.
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At 25% of GDP, you barely feel it.
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At 100%, both pedals are floored and the brake is wired to the accelerator.
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Two economists saw this danger coming in 1981.
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Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace predicted it in one of the most influential macroeconomic papers of the last 50 years.
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While the title doesn't exactly scream page turner, and it's not exactly the easiest read.
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In fact, I'd probably rather watch paint dry than read through it a second time.
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The stuff inside it is very interesting.
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They warn that if the government never runs a surplus, the central bank can't make the debt smaller.
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All it gets to decide is what form the debt takes, bonds or cash.
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Those are the two options.
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So when the Fed fights inflation, it's squeezing the cash side, which means the bond side has to grow to make up the difference.
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And bonds pay interest.
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So the longer the Fed holds the line, the faster that pile of debt compounds.
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So the tightening that brings inflation down today is the same thing that forces somebody to print later.
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Meaning the Fed isn't actually addressing the root of the problem.
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They're not actually fighting the inflation, they're just postponing it.
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And if you think this is just some doomer theory from 1981 with no bearing on today, well guess what?
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A few weeks ago the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh launched five new task forces to tackle different economic problems.
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One of them is an inflation frameworks task force to reassess how the Fed measures, understands, and responds to structural drivers of inflation.
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Three people were picked to lead this team.
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One of them is Thomas Sargent.
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The man who co-wrote the paper from 45 years ago is
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now being asked by the Fed to lead a team tackling the inflation issues.
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So inflation is clearly a concern for the Federal Reserve.
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But when you step outside and look around, it's quiet.
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Gas got cheaper last month.
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The headlines said cooling, you might even think this whole thing already sorted itself out.
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But the thing people forget is the ground is always the last thing to shake.
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By the time you feel an earthquake under your feet, the fault lines slipped a while ago and the impact's already on its way to you.
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The inflation numbers you see in the headlines are that ground.
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They move last.
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Housing is the clearest example.
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It's more than 35% of the entire basket the headline number is built on, and it's the slowest moving piece in it, because rents lock in for a year and reset in steps.
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So a big chunk of today's reading is measuring pressure that was released months ago.
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When the headlines say everything's calm, it's telling you the ground held.
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Yesterday.
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Waiting on the inflation number means finding out last.
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You need to work backwards to get to the truth.
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When you strip everything away, inflation is one thing, price is going up.
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But a price only goes up if somebody actually pays the higher one.
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And nobody pays more without having more to pay with.
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So the money moves first.
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Every time.
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And there's a number that measures exactly that.
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It's called M2.
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It's one of the main ways economists measure how much money is sloshing around the system.
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Think of it as all the cash within arm's reach of the economy.
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After 2020, the line goes pretty much vertical.
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The M2 money supply is currently growing at over 5.5% a year, the fastest pace since July 2022.
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But money doesn't reappear on its own, somebody has to put it there.
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So if inflation's the enemy, who exactly is quietly pumping fresh dollars back into the system?
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The answer's the Federal Reserve.
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To see how, you need to understand the least understood tool the Fed owns.
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Forget interest rates for a second.
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There's a second lever.
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This one's hidden in the back of Jerome Powell's closet, and it only comes out in case of an emergency.
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It's a literal money printer.
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When the economy's dying, like in 2020, the Fed creates money out of thin air and uses it to buy bonds, pushing that new money into the system to keep it alive.
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That flood of new money is called quantitative easing, and in the pandemic, they ran it harder than at any point in history.
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The Fed's balance sheet went from around $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion in about two years, leading to inflation spiking to over 9% in June 2022.
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But when inflation caught fire, the Fed was forced to do something they've only done twice in its more than 100-year history.
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They ran the money printer in reverse.
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Instead of creating money to buy bonds, the Fed let the bonds it already held expire and didn't replace them.
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Every month, a little less money in the system than the month before.
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This policy is called quantitative tightening, and it started in June of 2022.
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Over the next three and a half years, the Fed took more than $2.2 trillion off its balance sheet.
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It worked well enough that the money supply itself contracted, which sounds minor, but it's not.
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The last time the amount of money in the American economy meaningfully shrank was the Great Depression.
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But you also can't tighten forever.
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The United States financial system needs a certain amount of cash just sitting in it to function day to day, and if you drain past that line, things start breaking.
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So on December 1st of last year, the Fed announced quantitative tightening was over.
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They'd successfully taken out about half of the more than $5 trillion that was injected in the financial system during the pandemic.
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But then Jerome Powell snuck back out of the closet and turned the engine back on.
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Eleven days later, on December 12th, the Fed started buying bonds again, around $40 billion a month.
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The balance sheet it spent three and a half years draining is now refilling.
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So all this leaves us with a country running two very different stories at the same time.
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The first one shows up in the monthly reports, the headline numbers.
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That's the story everybody argues about, and you get a new story every 30 days.
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The second runs underneath all of it, the structural stuff.
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The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit for this fiscal year will reach $1.4 trillion.
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That's 5.8% of the entire economy and far above the previous 50-year average of 3.8%.
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The total national debt is closing in on $40 trillion, and the interest we pay on that debt is now over a trillion dollars a year.
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In 2021, interest ate about 9 cents out of every dollar the federal government collected.
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This year it's 19.
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It more than doubled in five years.
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Interest is now the third largest line in the entire federal budget.
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We spend more on it than we spend on the entire military.
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The debt snowball is playing out exactly as Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace warned.
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So how do we actually fix this mess?
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The best answer I've seen comes from the golden boy of the finance world, Warren Buffett.
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He was asked how he would deal with the deficit.
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Here's what he said.
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I get in the deficit in five minutes.
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How?
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You just pass a law that says that anytime there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.
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Now you've got the incentives in the right place, right?
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So it's capable of being done.
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A law that bars every sitting member of Congress from re-election anytime the deficit runs past 3% of GDP.
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He was laughing when he said it, but he's also completely right.
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We have an incentives problem.
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It's not just a problem on the left, or just a problem on the right.
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It's an American problem.
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Both parties do it.
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Think about how somebody actually gets a job in Congress.
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They campaign on promises, telling you they'll do this and that, because that's what wins.
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Nobody builds a career in Congress promising people less, so the incentives only point one direction, spending more.
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Which is how the national deficit has run past 3% of GDP for pretty much the entire 21st century.
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It hasn't just been an expensive couple of years, it's structural spending.
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We've been spending more than we bring in for a quarter of a century straight.
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The problem with going down this path is, it compounds.
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The more we borrow, the more interest we owe.
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The more interest we owe, the more we have to borrow.
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It's a never-ending, repeating cycle.
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We're on an unsustainable path that will eventually have to come to an end.
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And every year we put this off, the bill to deal with it just gets bigger.
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I'm curious to hear where other people land on this.
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Is this something we need to deal with now, or are people crashing out over nothing?
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Drop a comment and let me know.
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I'll be reading through them.
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Maybe Buffett's plan is too extreme.
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Or maybe it isn't extreme enough.
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We can argue about the right solution all day, but what we can't argue about is that this doesn't fix itself.
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Something eventually has to change.
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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección
Esta lección de conversación de nivel B2 se basa en el vídeo “The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think”. Las palabras que más se repiten: inflation, Fed, rate, interest. Este vídeo tiene 258 frases y 3195 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 16:44. El hablante habla rápido, unas 191 palabras por minuto, así que espera sonidos enlazados y reducidos. El 84 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés; conviene repasar el resto antes de empezar.
Vocabulario clave de este vídeo
Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| inflation sustantivo | /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/ | inflación |
| headline sustantivo | /ˈhɛd.laɪn/ | titular, encabezado |
| deficit sustantivo | /ˈdɛfəsɪt/ | déficit |
| recession sustantivo | /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/ | recesión |
| quietly adverbio | /ˈkwaɪ.ɪt.li/ | mansamente, despacio |
| tighten verbo | /ˈtaɪ.tən/ | apretar, tensar |
| economist sustantivo | /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/ | economista |
| effortless adjetivo | /ˈɛfə(ɹ)tlɪs/ | fácil, nada penoso |
| pendulum sustantivo | /ˈpɛnd͡ʒələm/ | péndulo |
| quantitative adjetivo | /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/ | cuantitativo |
| incentive sustantivo | /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ | incentivo, aliciente |
| structural adjetivo | /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/ | estructural |
| scoreboard sustantivo | marcador, tanteador | |
| printer sustantivo | /ˈpɹɪntɚ/ | impresor |
| borrow verbo | /ˈbɑɹ.oʊ/ | pedir prestado, tomar prestado |
Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| find out verbo | averiguar, anoticiarse | |
| go up verbo | subir | |
| back down verbo | recular, echarse atrás | |
| check out verbo | investigar, chequear | |
| fall apart verbo | despedazarse, desintegrarse | |
| get off verbo | bajarse | |
| make up verbo | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | reponer, suplir |
| pass down verbo | heredar, pasar |
Frases que vale la pena repetir
Frases cortas y completas del vídeo que puedes reutilizar en la conversación diaria:
- They only collect what's necessary to connect you.
- There's also your phone number.
- I'll be reading through them.
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — una acción que empezó antes y continúa | we've been talking · We've been spending |
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | being told · is priced · being pushed |
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | has now missed · have changed · we've seen |
| Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa | man who looks · side, which means · man who co |
Pronunciación a tener en cuenta
El hablante usa 40 contracciones y formas reducidas, como can't, doesn't, isn't. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.
- Los sonidos de “th”: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, throne /θɹəʊ̯n/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/
- Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, recession /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/, structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, cushion /ˈkʊʃən/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
- Palabras largas — cuida el acento: economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, accelerator /əkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪ.tɚ/, catastrophe /kəˈtæstɹəfi/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:
- s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, slam /ˈslæm/, spiral /ˈspaɪɹəl/, sponsor /ˈspɒn.səː/, sweat /swɛt/
- /v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/, lever /ˈliː.və/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, investor /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/
- /z/ — sonora, no /s/: closet /ˈklɑzɪt/, pause /pɔːz/, invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, compromise /ˈkɑmpɹəˌmaɪz/
Cómo practicar con este vídeo
- Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
- Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
- Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como inflation, headline, deficit.
¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.