Mark Blyth
speaker
294 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 3 Jul
Mark Blyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The biggest remaining thing that we've got right now in inflation is rent. So it's rent. It's the cost of rent. The rent is too damn high everywhere across America, across Europe, across every major city. Why is this? It's because we stopped building houses for normal people 30 years ago. There's just a supply shortage.
So if you're making the interest rate on mortgages more expensive, less building and construction is going to go on. A certain number of apartments and buildings just die every year. They're usually replaced. If it's too expensive to do the replacement cost, guess what? You've got a shortage of rentals. So what are you going to get? You're going to get a supply constraint.
You ain't got enough places to rent out. So if the Fed raises interest rates to cool the economy, what is it doing to the housing market? It's making sure that you're spending almost a third to a half year income on rent. You know, if your rent goes up by 30%, hell yeah, that's going to hurt, right? Right.
Now, this also tells us something else that's really important and never gets in the discussion of inflation. It matters where you sit in the income distribution. If you're a rich person, relative to your income, you don't consume much. And inflation is all about the stuff that you consume.
If you're a really rich person and you don't have a mortgage and you don't spend your money on fine bottles of Chateau Lafite every week, even if you do, it probably won't make a difference, right? You don't consume that much. You're not hurt that much by inflation.
If you're a single mom and you're working two jobs and your prices are going through the roof and you can't afford child care and your life's falling apart and your landlord's throwing you out because you can get someone else to pay a higher rent, it absolutely mars.
So it's like how it affects us individually across the income distribution. This is why people are pissed when people tell them inflation's going down. Because the level ain't going down, right? It's still 45 for a beef rib and that's absolutely scandalous.
It'll only be $47. It's really cold comfort.
Absolutely. I mean, honestly, in terms of giving people relief, think about it this way. If you don't have to spend as much money on the same wage, what I've done is I've increased your real wage. Right. Right? So if I can make everybody's rents 20% cheaper by increasing the supply of housing, That's a 20% wage increase. Right.
Yeah, I think you are. I think you've got both of them right there. I mean, let's take the Trump one and take it seriously, right? If you throw out every migrant in America, which would include me because I'm one of them, would you have less workers? Hell yeah, right?
But then you've got a big problem, because a lot of the people that you've got there who are the people you want to throw out are the ones that put food on the table, because they literally work on farms. None of us do that anymore. So I don't know how you're actually going to get the 40-year-old people who are out of work in some part of the United States to become agricultural workers.
There's a huge labor supply-demand mismatch in this idea. But let's suppose you could do that, and you can get everybody out, and then there's less workers, and that means employers have to pay more. How are employers going to pay for that?
Well, either they're really clever and they can increase productivity to pay for the wages, or they'll just push on the prices to everybody else who are the workers. Right, right. I mean, it doesn't come from nowhere, right?
That's right. And unless they have a magic avocado picker, which would automate the process and increase productivity, then they're going to have to push that on in prices. But if they did have that, that would lead to unemployment, right? Right. Right. Now, do the same with the tariffs, right? I'm going to put up 100% tariff against China. Everything in Walmart is made in China. Right.
So everything in Walmart now doubled in price. All those workers that you just gave a pay rise, they're getting it both from domestic costs and from international costs.
Now, there's a better argument for it which goes like this. And again, it's the productivity thing, right? If I put up tariffs, what I'm doing is two things. I'm advantaging American goods over foreign goods. So Walmart can stock American goods. Well, the problem is we don't make enough of the stuff that we actually consume. That would be an incentive for American firms to do a lot more, right?
Whether they would take up the incentive in any reasonable amount of time or whether they would just basically not bother. We don't know, right? So there are arguments around tariffs. It's called the optimal tariff about how much you can raise relative to costs, all this sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, generally speaking, most of us are a bit skeptical of the work in these things.
You get shortages, and the price goes up, all the rest of it. You're basically making foreign prices more expensive than domestic prices on the assumption that domestic production will take up that slack. It's not clear to me we're going to do this. Give you one example of Yeah. Remember during the pandemic, we had all this stuff about PPE, personal protective equipment? Yeah, yeah. Right.
Oh my God, it's all made in China. It's terrible, right? From permitting and planning to opening it up, how long do you think it would take to open up a factory in the United States that makes cotton buds? How long would it take? Five years. Five years? Five years. And that's just for goddamn cotton buds.
You know, the things you stick in your ear. Oh, Q-tip. Q-tips, right.
Showing 201–220 of 294 · page 11 of 15
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