Meanwhile unemployment is at the pre-COVID baseline already, historically low 3-4%, below the traditional 5% "full employment." Real wages (i.e. adjusted for all that inflation) is ALSO above pre-covid levels. https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_real_average_weekly_earnin...
House prices aren't increasing like they were, and the interest rate hike has made it expensive to buy a new house, but overall, it's really hard to claim people are being drained right now. Almost any other time has had worse employment, etc.
If I’m reading the last chart correctly, the real wage is up by about a dollar and a half per week given the timeframe of June 2023 vs Jan 2020.
That doesn’t seem significant and if you look at the shape of the graph it’s trending down from the real wage gains during the height of Covid. December 2020 shows $398 per week while today shows $378 per week, so while it’s still above a pre Covid level of $376 I don’t think this is a good signal of recovery.
So real (inflation adjusted) wages have been roughly static compared to before COVID. That seems a reasonable point to make compared to the OP's negative sentiment, which seems not to be backed up by the numbers.
Unemployment is just as low as before AND wages are just as high as before. That sounds like full recovery to me, and we were in a boom before as well, so that's recovering to boom time levels.
You are making good points by looking at broader indexes HOWEVER note that my previous wages link was adjusted for overall inflation, which includes more than just groceries and rent, so if going by an even broader index, the wages HAVE kept up with inflation, although just barely. Still impressive for wages to do so well even with a very low unemployment rate and suffering through two major shocks (COVID-19 and the food/energy price shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and the Fed’s increase in interest rates to keep inflation from spiraling out of control (due to those two spikes, plus the accumulated effects of years of monetary stimulus to recover from the Great Recession).
>> Over the year, food prices rose 7.4 percent. Prices for food at home increased 6.2 percent since a year ago, with higher prices in all six grocery categories. Prices for food away from home increased 9.5 percent.
I provided a link to the index if you don’t believe me. Retail prices are stubborn to reduce (because retailers are obviously reluctant to sell inventory at a loss which they had bought when prices were high), but a large consumer can access these reduced prices, as you probably can if you bargain aggressively. Here, I’ll paste it again: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber
Additionally, gas prices are to pre-war levels (https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts), natural gas prices are back below pre-war, actually below pre-Covid levels (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm). Lumber is back to pre-covid levels (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber). Milk is back to pre-covid levels (https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/milk).
Meanwhile unemployment is at the pre-COVID baseline already, historically low 3-4%, below the traditional 5% "full employment." Real wages (i.e. adjusted for all that inflation) is ALSO above pre-covid levels. https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_real_average_weekly_earnin...
House prices aren't increasing like they were, and the interest rate hike has made it expensive to buy a new house, but overall, it's really hard to claim people are being drained right now. Almost any other time has had worse employment, etc.