Funny thing, I have paid off most of the principle on my student loans but I owe more in interest than I did in principle to begin with.

My mom had 3 eight year degrees and only just paid off the loans completely when she turned 72. Paid off the principle when she turned 43, after achieving her third. Id be perfectly fine with removing or severely limiting loansharking in colleges at its the main problem anyway, and every college practically has a loansharking department inside the college itself.

It's a shitty system. Not gonna disagree with you there. I was lucky my student loans weren't too bad and paid them off as quick as possible.

Is inflation going to worsen in Canada too?

Everywhere. Capitalism comes with a fiduciary duty to always maximize profits. This isn't possible in a finite system, so the monetary system is floating and infinite to facilitate ever-growing numbers on a ledger sheet.

less than US, more than Euro, qualified as "rampant" inflation level in CA

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/inflation-cpi
https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/inflation-cpi

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Inflation itself is an incomplete indicator, but it still gives a good idea : workers are screwed because they mostly hang on money.
If you dig gold or hold a well working business it's much lessy a problem.
What's even more unfair is that countries with an already opened inflation are the less reactive ones to re-align welfare or helps (ie: covid) with the said inflation.

its going to become A LOT worse, but my assets are inflation proof so whatever

let it burn

Comparing with 2008, before the low point of the great recession was hit, is not a good argument to make.

In either case, we must look at both nominal inflation, which is important for those living on fixed income like pensioners, public employees or welfare/relief/unemployment benefits and the like, but also real wage growth. If the latter is too far in the negative, then working people, which make up the majority of the economy, will see their disposable income decline, which will in turn have disastrous ramifications for both the economy (big downward pressure) and the political mood.

Shrugging off a sudden loss of 16% of people's purchasing power would be foolish. Even more so when we keep in mind that low income people always tend to be hit harder by inflation than the average citizen, so the poor would be faced with 20+% inflation for their consumer basket in this scenario.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 1 2022 06:55pm

There's a reason why the fed targets an average of 2%. Because years like this happen.

This and next year will likely be high inflation, but not like something that's gonna shatter the economy. At least, not something that's going to do that on its own, although it might exascerbate underlying trends that were already strongly headed in that direction.

Dunno about the FED, but when it comes to the ECB, this is revisionist history. Its goal used to state "our target is always to have an inflation near, but below 2%". Recently, they changed the ECB mission statement to "our target is a long-term average inflation of near, but below 2%", which was specifically done so the ECB could justify keeping up its insane QE in spite of a surging inflation. (Which is what the mediterranean states wanted for a long time anyway, so that they can inflate away their untenable mountains of public debt at the expense of the other, more fiscally solid eurozone countries.)




Possible, but I think you're overconfident in this prediction. Also gotta keep in mind that a sudden surge of inflation will catch a lot of people off guard, for example because they're unable to renegotiate their salary accordingly to compensate for the sudden loss in purchasing power. Six years of 0% inflation, followed by two years of 8% is worse for most folks than eight years of 2% inflation, even if the average is the same.

Anyway, I am of the belief that inflation has already become a big political liability for Democrats/the Biden admin. We'll see how it plays out.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 1 2022 08:31pm