New Orleans        Inflation is starting to edge forward in the United States.  For the White House, that will mean finger pointing and bully pulpit time once again, as Trump tries to divert attention away from his on-again-off-again tariff tantrums.  In some fever dream, he thinks he can blame it on the head of the Federal Reserve, whose mission is to combat inflation and save jobs, while he wants it to simply lower interest rates.  The impact of his attacks on Chairman Powell and his independence are roiling global markets and threatening the dollar.

Never a dull moment, which is part of the point, I guess.  I do have some sympathy about the president’s frustration with inflation, even if in this case, he’s the primary cause of the problem.  Perhaps the feeblest campaign I ever ran in the early ACORN decade was our Anti-Inflation Campaign.  The problem was real in the late 1970s, but we were fighting shadows without clear targets.  I can remember joining the action in Memphis with a dozen or more folks, waving signs and chanting, and realizing this was one campaign that wasn’t well-thought-out, and needed to be shelved.  ACORN Canada last year was getting pressure from their members to do something, and I warned the staff about my bad experience. Wisely, they focused on doing actions on specific grocery stores, which might not have moved the needle on macroeconomics, but saw energetic actions that the members loved and had local impact.

Trump might soon find the range of his impotence as well, though he’ll never concede the errors, and seems committed to continuing them.  GM announced a $1 billion loss charge because of tariffs, even as their sales increased.  His message to big retailers like Amazon and Walmart that they needed to simply eat the losses from the tariffs and hold the line on prices might have gotten some head nods, but also seems to have had some mixed results.  The Wall Street Journal looked past Amazon’s gaslighting agreement with the president and found the opposite.  Using an analysis of prices from an e-commerce data firm, they “…found that while Amazon’s price rose on 1200 of its cheapest household goods, competitor Walmart lowered prices on the same items by nearly 2%.”  Trump is on a hate campaign against the Journal, because they had the gall to publish that he had written a birthday greeting back in the day to Epstein, the sex offender, which has prompted him to sue the paper and its owner for $10 billion and bar them from the press pool, so this story of Amazon playing him can’t have been easily digested as he read the morning papers.

The real facts indicate that Amazon even raised the price on domestically produced Campbell’s Soup by 30%.  When tariffs were at play, they went wild.  As the Journal reports,

Imported goods and products with mixed origins – domestically assembled with imported components – were hit with even steeper hikes.  Take the stackable metal basket from Ohio-based Dayglow LLC, which imports from China and other countries.  Before mid-February, Amazon sold it for $9.31.  By late April, Amazon had lifted the price to $19.99.  Dayglow hasn’t changed the prices it charges Amazon despite paying more on its imported goods….

I would have thought an old school hustler like Trump would have understood he was simply “talking to the hand” in asking companies to eat the tariffs and not raise prices.  Doing so isn’t even a factor of late-stage capitalism, it’s just plain vanilla everyday capitalism.  The problem with Trump triggering inflation is that for American consumers this is his lesson, but we are having to pay the price for it!