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stagflation is the fear of central banks under capitalism, because the central bank ostensibly has only one move: raise or lower interest rates.

they raise interest rates to contract credit and induce layoffs, to loosen the labor markets. they rarely admit this, and usually it's behind coded language. but jon stewart interviewed some fed reserve clown during the recent spiking of interest rates and got him to admit it, which was wild to see.

they lower interest rates when they believe labor is sufficiently punished and its time to let the capital formations borrow cheap again to hoover up all the depressed assets from the previous crisis and mark them back up at a profit to make the books look good. they never admit this.

stagflation is the structural problem of too many material crises stacking up on the workers and the lever doesn't do the thing they want anymore, instead the prices go up even with mass layoffs and tight credit markets. when this happened in the 70s, the directives of the Powell Memo / neoliberalism began in earnest. unions were gutted, democratically controlled assets like pensions and municipal funds were plundered, deregulation and offshoring exploded, war spending increased dramatically, welfare "reform", and the wealthy got a big payday.

the problem with stagflation happening today is that the low hanging fruit of 40 years ago is gone and not much meat is left on the bone, and it's already spoken for. the last big piece of the pie would be to privatize social security which has long been a project of neoliberals, but it is still generally recognized as a legislative third rail: touch it and die.

so, my guess is, they'll do it through the courts. can't wait to see the test tube case they fabricate for making social security violate my god given right to invest my talents of silver into crypto.