쉐도잉 연습: The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think - 영상으로 영어 말하기 배우기

Right now, everyone's blaming inflation on the Middle East.

That's the narrative we're being told and everyone's accepted it.

And it makes sense why.

It's easy to follow.

There's a clean cause and a clean effect.

It's so simple you can draw it on a napkin.

Except there's one problem with this story.

The Federal Reserve keeps its own inflation scoreboard.

They don't use the number you see in the headlines.

They target 2% inflation measured by personal consumption expenditures, the PCE.

That's the scoreboard that counts.

That's also where the mainstream story falls apart.

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,

more than five years straight.

The PCE currently sits at a little over 4%, more than double the Fed's target, and is continuing to climb,

so everyone's using a five-month-old story to diagnose a five-year-old problem.

And this isn't just a number that only matters to economists.

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.

Your mortgage, your car loan, what your savings account pays you, what the cash in your wallet is worth next year.

So it's worth asking, what's actually going on?

Because there's clearly more to the inflation story.

Inflation in this country used to move like a pendulum.

It would swing up, swing back down, and eventually come to rest around that 2% number.

You never questioned it, because you never had to.

even had a name for this period of American history, the Great Moderation.

From 1985 to 2007, growth was steady, inflation was low, and the whole economy looked like it regulated itself.

Except it didn't.

There was no invisible hand.

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,

done so reliably for so long that everyone forgot the pendulum was being pushed at all.

That's what the last five years are actually about.

The thing doing the pushing is now the one in trouble.

But before we get there, we need to look closer at that 2% number itself.

For a number the entire financial system is anchored to, you'd assume it fell out of some impossibly complex math equation,

or it was carved in stone and passed down generations.

Well, neither.

Somebody chose it.

So why the 2%?

Here's St. Louis Federal Reserve economist Christopher Neely explaining how they landed on that 2% target number.

When central banks were considering what sort of an inflation rate to target,

they were really trading off the costs of having inflation with the benefits of having some upward movement in prices,

which might have benefits in terms of allowing central banks to stabilize the macroeconomy.

So 2% was kind of a happy medium.

So while the target number itself may have come from an arbitrary decision, there's still reasoning behind it.

But why not go lower?

Why not go to zero?

That's the obvious question.

If inflation's the thing quietly making everything more expensive, why aim for any of it at all?

Because while on paper, a zero percent inflation rate sounds great, in reality, it's not.

When a recession hits, the Fed's main move is to cut interest rates.

In a world with zero inflation, rates already sit near the floor.

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.

That's how an ordinary recession can spiral into a decade-long depression.

But you can't aim too high either.

Push it to 4%, and prices double every 18 years.

Businesses can't forecast their cost, and nobody can price a long-term contract without guessing.

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.

But actually hitting that number, year after year, is close to impossible.

It takes a balancing act so unforgiving, it would make Evel Knievel sweat.

And for the last few decades, the Fed made this balancing act look effortless.

We're just now finding out how easy it was, now that things have changed.

But before I get into that, a quick pause.

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Now back to the Federal Reserve's World Class Balancing Act.

For the last few decades, we managed to control inflation.

The walk towards the 2% target looked effortless.

But it only looked effortless because the tightrope was 6 inches off the ground.

And the only reason we know that is because we've seen what the same walk looks like 60 feet up.

But I'm trying to be a more positive guy these days.

So before I show you the ugly, let me show you the good part.

Back when the Feds still had room to work with.

Let's rewind to the late 70s.

Inflation wasn't drifting anymore.

It was sprinting.

It peaked at over 13.5%.

At that pace, prices double in about nine years.

The dollar in your pocket was rotting while you held it, and every single person could feel it happening.

So who do you call when inflation is out of control?

No. Not Ghostbusters.

You call 6'7", cigar-smoking Paul Volcker, the kind of man who looks like he eats recessions for breakfast.

100

Volcker takes over as Fed chair in 1979 and does the one thing nobody else had the stomach for.

101

He drives interest rates to 20%.

102

He deliberately triggers not one recession, but two, back to back, strangling the money supply until inflation has nothing left to feed on.

103

It was so aggressive, it earned a name of its own, the Volcker Shock.

104

And it worked.

105

Inflation went from over 13.5% down to bottoming out under 2% in the late 80s.

106

So take a look at the timeline.

107

From 1980 to 1983, Volcker tightens monetary policy aggressively, triggers two back to back recessions and successfully drops inflation by more than 10 points.

108

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.

109

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?

110

It's because he had one advantage nobody talks about, the country could absorb the damage.

111

When Volcker first claimed the throne, the national debt was about a quarter the size of the economy.

112

By today's standards, pretty much nothing.

113

So when he drove rates to 20%, it was brutal, but it was clean.

114

Raising rates did the one thing he intended it to do, slam the brakes.

115

But that world is gone.

116

The national debt is now sitting around 100% of GDP, a one-to-one match with the entire economy.

117

The last time it was this high was the Second World War, but the number is only half of it.

118

The other half is what the number does.

119

When the Fed raises rates now, it presses down in two places at once.

120

The first is the breaks.

121

Higher rates, pricier loans, less borrowing and a slower economy.

122

Simple.

123

The second is hidden underneath and quietly emerges by accident.

124

Higher rates also mean the government pays more interest on what it already owes.

125

And that bill is not small.

126

Net interest is running around a trillion dollars a year, more than the entire military budget.

127

In 2021, interest ate about 9% of every dollar the federal government collected.

128

This year, it's 19%.

129

But those interest payments don't just vanish from the economy.

130

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.

131

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,

132

or rolled into the next bond at the new higher rate.

133

Which basically means the same move that's supposed to pull money out of the economy starts quietly sending it back in.

134

So one foot presses the brake, the other one quietly presses the gas.

135

And the heavier the debt, the harder that second foot pushes.

136

At 25% of GDP, you barely feel it.

137

At 100%, both pedals are floored and the brake is wired to the accelerator.

138

Two economists saw this danger coming in 1981.

139

Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace predicted it in one of the most influential macroeconomic papers of the last 50 years.

140

While the title doesn't exactly scream page turner, and it's not exactly the easiest read.

141

In fact, I'd probably rather watch paint dry than read through it a second time.

142

The stuff inside it is very interesting.

143

They warn that if the government never runs a surplus, the central bank can't make the debt smaller.

144

All it gets to decide is what form the debt takes, bonds or cash.

145

Those are the two options.

146

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.

147

And bonds pay interest.

148

So the longer the Fed holds the line, the faster that pile of debt compounds.

149

So the tightening that brings inflation down today is the same thing that forces somebody to print later.

150

Meaning the Fed isn't actually addressing the root of the problem.

151

They're not actually fighting the inflation, they're just postponing it.

152

And if you think this is just some doomer theory from 1981 with no bearing on today, well guess what?

153

A few weeks ago the new Fed chair Kevin Warsh launched five new task forces to tackle different economic problems.

154

One of them is an inflation frameworks task force to reassess how the Fed measures, understands, and responds to structural drivers of inflation.

155

Three people were picked to lead this team.

156

One of them is Thomas Sargent.

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The man who co-wrote the paper from 45 years ago is

158

now being asked by the Fed to lead a team tackling the inflation issues.

159

So inflation is clearly a concern for the Federal Reserve.

160

But when you step outside and look around, it's quiet.

161

Gas got cheaper last month.

162

The headlines said cooling, you might even think this whole thing already sorted itself out.

163

But the thing people forget is the ground is always the last thing to shake.

164

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.

165

The inflation numbers you see in the headlines are that ground.

166

They move last.

167

Housing is the clearest example.

168

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.

169

So a big chunk of today's reading is measuring pressure that was released months ago.

170

When the headlines say everything's calm, it's telling you the ground held.

171

Yesterday.

172

Waiting on the inflation number means finding out last.

173

You need to work backwards to get to the truth.

174

When you strip everything away, inflation is one thing, price is going up.

175

But a price only goes up if somebody actually pays the higher one.

176

And nobody pays more without having more to pay with.

177

So the money moves first.

178

Every time.

179

And there's a number that measures exactly that.

180

It's called M2.

181

It's one of the main ways economists measure how much money is sloshing around the system.

182

Think of it as all the cash within arm's reach of the economy.

183

After 2020, the line goes pretty much vertical.

184

The M2 money supply is currently growing at over 5.5% a year, the fastest pace since July 2022.

185

But money doesn't reappear on its own, somebody has to put it there.

186

So if inflation's the enemy, who exactly is quietly pumping fresh dollars back into the system?

187

The answer's the Federal Reserve.

188

To see how, you need to understand the least understood tool the Fed owns.

189

Forget interest rates for a second.

190

There's a second lever.

191

This one's hidden in the back of Jerome Powell's closet, and it only comes out in case of an emergency.

192

It's a literal money printer.

193

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.

194

That flood of new money is called quantitative easing, and in the pandemic, they ran it harder than at any point in history.

195

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.

196

But when inflation caught fire, the Fed was forced to do something they've only done twice in its more than 100-year history.

197

They ran the money printer in reverse.

198

Instead of creating money to buy bonds, the Fed let the bonds it already held expire and didn't replace them.

199

Every month, a little less money in the system than the month before.

200

This policy is called quantitative tightening, and it started in June of 2022.

201

Over the next three and a half years, the Fed took more than $2.2 trillion off its balance sheet.

202

It worked well enough that the money supply itself contracted, which sounds minor, but it's not.

203

The last time the amount of money in the American economy meaningfully shrank was the Great Depression.

204

But you also can't tighten forever.

205

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.

206

So on December 1st of last year, the Fed announced quantitative tightening was over.

207

They'd successfully taken out about half of the more than $5 trillion that was injected in the financial system during the pandemic.

208

But then Jerome Powell snuck back out of the closet and turned the engine back on.

209

Eleven days later, on December 12th, the Fed started buying bonds again, around $40 billion a month.

210

The balance sheet it spent three and a half years draining is now refilling.

211

So all this leaves us with a country running two very different stories at the same time.

212

The first one shows up in the monthly reports, the headline numbers.

213

That's the story everybody argues about, and you get a new story every 30 days.

214

The second runs underneath all of it, the structural stuff.

215

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the deficit for this fiscal year will reach $1.4 trillion.

216

That's 5.8% of the entire economy and far above the previous 50-year average of 3.8%.

217

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.

218

In 2021, interest ate about 9 cents out of every dollar the federal government collected.

219

This year it's 19.

220

It more than doubled in five years.

221

Interest is now the third largest line in the entire federal budget.

222

We spend more on it than we spend on the entire military.

223

The debt snowball is playing out exactly as Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace warned.

224

So how do we actually fix this mess?

225

The best answer I've seen comes from the golden boy of the finance world, Warren Buffett.

226

He was asked how he would deal with the deficit.

227

Here's what he said.

228

I get in the deficit in five minutes.

229

How?

230

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.

231

Now you've got the incentives in the right place, right?

232

So it's capable of being done.

233

A law that bars every sitting member of Congress from re-election anytime the deficit runs past 3% of GDP.

234

He was laughing when he said it, but he's also completely right.

235

We have an incentives problem.

236

It's not just a problem on the left, or just a problem on the right.

237

It's an American problem.

238

Both parties do it.

239

Think about how somebody actually gets a job in Congress.

240

They campaign on promises, telling you they'll do this and that, because that's what wins.

241

Nobody builds a career in Congress promising people less, so the incentives only point one direction, spending more.

242

Which is how the national deficit has run past 3% of GDP for pretty much the entire 21st century.

243

It hasn't just been an expensive couple of years, it's structural spending.

244

We've been spending more than we bring in for a quarter of a century straight.

245

The problem with going down this path is, it compounds.

246

The more we borrow, the more interest we owe.

247

The more interest we owe, the more we have to borrow.

248

It's a never-ending, repeating cycle.

249

We're on an unsustainable path that will eventually have to come to an end.

250

And every year we put this off, the bill to deal with it just gets bigger.

251

I'm curious to hear where other people land on this.

252

Is this something we need to deal with now, or are people crashing out over nothing?

253

Drop a comment and let me know.

254

I'll be reading through them.

255

Maybe Buffett's plan is too extreme.

256

Or maybe it isn't extreme enough.

257

We can argue about the right solution all day, but what we can't argue about is that this doesn't fix itself.

258

Something eventually has to change.

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이 레슨의 어휘와 말하기 포인트

이 B2 수준 말하기 레슨은 영상 “The Inflation Problem... It's Worse Than You Think”을(를) 바탕으로 합니다. 가장 자주 반복되는 단어는 다음과 같습니다: inflation, Fed, rate, interest. 이 영상에는 섀도잉할 문장 258개와 단어 3195개가 있습니다. 말하는 구간의 길이는 16:44입니다. 화자는 분당 약 191단어로 빠르게 말하므로 연음과 약하게 발음되는 소리가 많습니다. 단어의 84%가 영어에서 가장 많이 쓰이는 3,000단어에 속합니다. 나머지는 연습 전에 미리 확인해 두세요.

이 영상의 핵심 어휘

영상에서 가장 어려운 단어 15개를 발음, 뜻과 함께 정리했습니다.

단어	발음	뜻
inflation 명사	/ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/	인플레이션, 인플레
headline 명사	/ˈhɛd.laɪn/	표제, 헤드라인
deficit 명사	/ˈdɛfəsɪt/	적자
recession 명사	/ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/	불황, 후퇴
quietly 부사	/ˈkwaɪ.ɪt.li/	조용하게, 조용히
economist 명사	/iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/	경제학자
pendulum 명사	/ˈpɛnd͡ʒələm/	진자
scoreboard 명사		스코어보드, 득점판
printer 명사	/ˈpɹɪntɚ/	인쇄자
borrow 동사	/ˈbɑɹ.oʊ/	빌리다, 일시적으로 받는
warn 동사	/woɹn/	경고하다
drain 명사	/dɹiːn/	배수구
compound 명사	/ˈkɑmpaʊnd/	화합물
bidder 명사	/ˈbɪ.dɚ/	입찰자
diagnose 동사	/ˈdaɪ.əɡˌnoʊs/	진단

영상에 나오는 구동사

단어	뜻
go up 동사	올라가다
go down 동사	내려가다
look around 동사	둘러보다

따라 말해 볼 만한 문장

영상에 나오는 짧고 완결된 문장으로, 일상 대화에서 그대로 쓸 수 있습니다:

They only collect what's necessary to connect you.
There's also your phone number.
I'll be reading through them.

이 영상의 문법

화자가 가장 많이 쓰는 문형을 영상 속 실제 표현과 함께 정리했습니다.

문형	영상 속 표현
현재완료진행 have/has been + -ing — 전에 시작해 지금도 계속되는 동작	we've been talking · We've been spending
수동태 be + 과거분사 — 누가 하는지보다 무슨 일이 일어나는지에 초점	being told · is priced · being pushed
현재완료 have/has + 과거분사 — 과거의 일이 지금도 관련이 있을 때	has now missed · have changed · we've seen
관계절 who / which + 절 — 사람이나 사물에 대한 추가 정보	man who looks · side, which means · man who co

주의할 발음

화자는 can't, doesn't, isn't 같은 축약형과 약화된 형태를 40번 사용합니다. 들리는 대로 짧게 발음하세요.

“th” 소리: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, throne /θɹəʊ̯n/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, earthquake /ˈɝθkweɪk/
“sh”와 “zh” 소리: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, recession /ɹɪˈsɛʃn̩/, structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, cushion /ˈkʊʃən/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
긴 단어 — 강세 위치에 주의: economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/, quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, accelerator /əkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪ.tɚ/, catastrophe /kəˈtæstɹəfi/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/

한국어 화자가 어려워하는 소리:

/f/ — ㅍ(/p/)으로 바꾸지 말고 윗니를 아랫입술에 대기: inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, deficit /ˈdɛfəsɪt/, effortless /ˈɛfə(ɹ)tlɪs/, catastrophe /kəˈtæstɹəfi/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/
/v/ — ㅂ(/b/)과 구별하기: quantitative /ˈkwɑn.təˌteɪ.tɪv/, incentive /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/, lever /ˈliː.və/, verification /ˌvɛ.ɹə.fɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, investor /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/
/z/ — ㅈ이 아니라 성대를 울리는 /s/: closet /ˈklɑzɪt/, pause /pɔːz/, invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, compromise /ˈkɑmpɹəˌmaɪz/

이 영상으로 연습하는 방법

먼저 말하지 않고 영상을 끝까지 듣고 모르는 단어를 적어 둡니다.
0.75배속으로 한 문장씩 섀도잉을 시작하고, 익숙해지면 보통 속도로 돌아갑니다.
자신의 목소리를 녹음해 원본과 비교하고, inflation, headline, deficit 같은 단어에 특히 주의합니다.

쉐도잉이란? 영어 실력을 빠르게 키우는 과학적 방법

쉐도잉(Shadowing)은 원래 전문 통역사 훈련을 위해 개발된 언어 학습 기법으로, 다언어 학자인 Dr. Alexander Arguelles에 의해 대중화된 방법입니다. 핵심 원리는 간단하지만 매우 강력합니다: 원어민의 영어를 들으면서 1~2초의 짧은 지연으로 즉시 소리 내어 따라 말하는 것——마치 '그림자(shadow)'처럼 화자를 따라가는 것입니다. 문법 공부나 수동적인 청취와 달리, 쉐도잉은 뇌와 입 근육이 동시에 실시간으로 영어를 처리하고 재현하도록 훈련합니다. 연구에 따르면 이 방법은 발음 정확도, 억양, 리듬, 연음, 청취력, 말하기 유창성을 크게 향상시킵니다. IELTS 스피킹 준비와 자연스러운 영어 소통을 원하는 분들에게 특히 효과적입니다.

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쉐도잉이란? 영어 실력을 빠르게 키우는 과학적 방법