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stagflation revisited?
Worry about stagflation begins to grow
It is a blast from the past that many economists fear
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Paul Wiseman – The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Stagflation. It was the dreaded “S word” of the 1970s.
For Americans of a certain age, it conjures memories of painfully long lines at gas stations, shuttered factories and President Gerald Ford’s much-ridiculed “Whip Inflation Now” buttons.
Stagflation is the bitterest of economic pills: High inflation mixes with a weak job market to cause a toxic brew that punishes consumers and befuddles economists.
For decades, most economists didn’t think such a nasty concoction was even possible. They’d long assumed that inflation would run high only when the economy was strong and unemployment low.
But an unhappy confluence of events has economists reaching back to the days of disco and the bleak high-inflation, high-unemployment economy of nearly a half century ago. Few think stagflation is in sight. But as a longer-term threat, it can no longer be dismissed.
Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen invoked the word in remarks to reporters: “The economic outlook globally,” Yellen said, “is challenging and uncertain, and higher food and energy prices are having stagflationary effects, namely depressing output and spending and raising inflation all around the world.”
Last Thursday, the government estimated that the economy shrank at a 1.5% annual rate from January through March. But the drop was due mostly to two factors that don’t reflect the economy’s underlying strength: A rising trade gap caused by Americans’ appetite for foreign products and a slowdown in the restocking of businesses inventories after a big holiday season buildup.
For now, economists broadly agree that the U.S. economy has enough oomph to avoid a recession. But the problems are piling up. Supply chain bottlenecks and disruptions from Russia’s war against Ukraine have sent consumer prices surging at their fastest pace in decades.
The Federal Reserve and other central banks, blindsided by raging inflation, are scrambling to catch up by aggressively raising interest rates. They hope to cool growth enough to tame inflation without causing a recession.
It’s a notoriously difficult task. The widespread fear, reflected in shrunken stock prices, is that the Fed will end up botching it and will clobber the economy without delivering a knockout blow to inflation.
This month, former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke told The New York Times that “inflation’s still too high but coming down. So, there should be a period in the next year or two where growth is low, unemployment is at least up a little bit and inflation is still high.”
And then Bernanke summed up his thoughts: “You could call that stagflation.”
What Is Stagflation?
There’s no formal definition or specific statistical threshold.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has his own rough guide: Stagflation arrives in the United States, he says, when the unemployment rate reaches at least 5% and consumer prices have surged 5% or more from a year earlier. The U.S. unemployment rate is now just 3.6%.
In the European Union, where joblessness typically runs higher, Zandi’s threshold is different: 9% unemployment and 4% year-over-year inflation, in his view, would combine to cause stagflation. Until about 50 years ago, economists viewed stagflation as a near-impossibility. They hewed to something called the Phillips Curve, named for its creator, economist A.W.H. “Bill’’ Phillips (1914-1975) of New Zealand. This theory held that inflation and unemployment move in opposite directions. It sounds like common sense: When the economy is weak and lots of people are out of work, businesses find it hard to raise prices. So, inflation should stay low. Likewise, when the economy is hot enough for businesses to pass along big price hikes to their customers, unemployment should stay fairly low.
Somehow, reality hasn’t proved so straightforward. What can throw things off is a supply shock — say, a surge in the cost of raw materials that ignites inflation and leaves consumers with less money to spend to fuel the economy. Which is exactly what happened in the 1970s. Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other countries that supported Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Oil prices jumped and stayed high. The cost of living grew more unaffordable for many. The economy reeled. Enter stagflation. Each year from 1974 through 1982, inflation and unemployment in the United States both topped 5%. The combination of the
In fact, two figures, which came to be called the “misery index,” peaked at a most miserable 20.6 in 1980. Stagflation occurs when high inflation and slow economic growth happen simultaneously. Has Stagflation Arrived? No. For now, the stagflation glass is only half-full. There’s “flation’’ for sure: Consumer prices shot up 8.3% in April from a year earlier, just below a 41-year high set the previous month. Consumer prices are surging largely because the economy rebounded with unexpected vigor from the brief but devastating pandemic recession. Factories, ports and freight yards have been overwhelmed trying to keep up with an unexpected jump in customer orders. The result has been delays, shortages and higher prices.
Janet Yellen U.S. Treasury Secretary
Gianrené Padilla
Viva Puerto Rico Short-Term Rental Alliance
Short-Term Rentals: Facts vs Feelings
Some people make decisions and judgments on feelings, while others base their views on facts supported by objective data and information. In the business world, facts are much more important than feelings when deciding.
Data and information are needed to better understand situations and reach reasonable conclusions in all fields. The visitor accommodation segment of the tourism industry is no exception. As in many industries, new consumers are driving trends that are reshaping the market. New market players are filling these contemporary needs, impacting traditional players, who for their part fight against these market changes instead of evolving with them.
A clear example, which has gained strength in recent years, is the rise of accommodations that enter the short-term rental market and how the traditional segment of hotels and inns fight against it because they feel threatened. Although there are important issues to attend regarding the regulation and supervision of short-term rentals, the fear of this segment is based more on feelings than on facts. Here are seven misconceptions about short-term rentals according to Airdna (www. airdna.co), one of the largest data aggregators in the short-term rental segment: 1. Short-term rentals are in direct competition with hotels: Incorrect: 35% of STRs are in non-traditional tourist areas. 2. Travelers are willing to pay the same price for a hotel as a shortterm rental: Wrong: Short-term rental guests spend an average of 65% more per night than hotel guests. 3. Travelers stay in hotels the same as they stay in short-term rentals: Wrong: Short-term rental guests tend to stay 72% longer than the average hotel guest, maximizing their economic impact.
4. Short-term rentals have no budget impact for tourism organizations: Incorrect: Like hotels, short-term rentals now collect lodging taxes for DMOs and/or municipal governments in all 50 states and US territories 5. Short-term rentals follow the same demand/sale’s patterns as traditional accommodation: Wrong: Short-term rentals attract a more resilient traveler and therefore seasonality curves tend to smooth out. 6. All types of short-term rental properties are the same: Wrong: 60% of short-term rentals are two bedrooms or more. Larger units naturally have their own issues when it comes to rates, occupancy, seasonality, etc. 7. DMOs are not considering short-term rentals in their marketing plans and strategies: Wrong: More and more DMOs are incorporating short-term rental data into their marketing plans. Just as hotels are a great lodging option wherever one travels, short-term accommodations provide the same value within the gaps hotels can’t fill. DMOs that understand this can better allocate funds to run effective marketing campaigns that increase demand because the supply will be there.
These are all facts and information that were researched by Airdna and can be validated by anyone. Based on these (and other data), we can conclude that because hotels and short-term rentals offer a fundamentally different visitor experience, these segments are not in direct competition, and both are
important to having a destination offering varied and complete.
In fact,
Some fellow cartoonists disliked the way Schulz commercialized the “Peanuts” characters. >Gordon Donovan/iStock
Exhibits honor ‘Peanuts’ creator Schulz on 100th birthday
At the time of Schulz’s retirement in 1999, his creation ran in more than 2,600 newspapers
Andrew Welsh-Huggins and Patrick Orsagos, The Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — In a series of “Peanuts” comic strips that ran in mid-April of 1956, Charlie Brown grasps the string of his kite, which was stuck in what came to be known in the long-running strip as the “kiteeating tree.”
In one episode that week, a frustrated Charlie Brown declines an offer from nemesis Lucy for her to yell at the tree.
“If I had a kite caught up in a tree, I’d yell at it,” Lucy responds in the last panel.
The simplicity of that interaction illustrates how different “Peanuts” was from comics drawn before its 1950 debut, said Lucy Shelton Caswell, founding curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University in Columbus, the world’s largest such museum.
“The idea that you could take a week to talk about this, and it didn’t have to be a gag in the sense of somebody hitting somebody else over the head with a bottle or whatever,” Caswell said. “This was really revolutionary.”
New exhibits on display at the Billy Ireland museum and at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, are celebrating the upcoming centenary of the birth of “Peanuts” cartoonist Schulz, born in Minnesota on Nov. 26, 1922.
Schulz carried the lifelong nickname of Sparky, conferred by a relative after a horse called Sparky
Benjamin Clark Curator, Schulz Museum
in an early comic strip, Barney Google.
Schulz was never a fan of the name “Peanuts,” chosen by the syndicate because his original title, “Li’l Folks,” was too similar to another strip’s name. But the Columbus exhibit makes clear through strips, memorabilia and commentary that Schulz’s creation was a juggernaut in its day.
At the time of Schulz’s retirement in 1999 following a cancer diagnosis, his creation ran in more than 2,600 newspapers, was translated into 21 languages in 75 countries and had an estimated daily readership of 355 million. Schulz personally created and drew 17,897 “Peanuts” strips, even after a tremor affected his hand.
The strip was also the subject of the frequently performed play, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” as well as “Snoopy: The Musical,” dozens of TV specials and shows, and many book collections.
Bill Watterson, creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” described in a 2007 Wall Street Journal review of a Schultz biography the difficulty of looking at “Peanuts” with fresh eyes because of how revolutionary it was at the time.
Benjamin Clark, curator of the Schulz museum, describes that innovation as Schulz’s use of a spare line that maintains its expressiveness.
Charles Schulz. >WikiMedia Commons
Schulz “understood technically in drawing that he could strip away what was unnecessary and still pack an emotional punch with the simplestappearing lines,” Clark said. “But that simplicity is deceptive. There’s so much in these.”
The exhibit in Columbus displays strips featuring 12 “devices” that Schulz thought set Peanuts apart, including episodes involving the kite-eating tree, Snoopy’s doghouse, Lucy in her psychiatry booth, Linus’ obsession with the Great Pumpkin, the Beethoven-playing Schroeder, and more.
“Celebrating Sparky” also focuses on Schulz’s promotion of women’s rights through strips about Title IX, the groundbreaking law requiring parity in women’s sports; and his introduction of a character of color, Franklin, spurred by a reader’s urging following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
In addition, the display includes memorabilia, from branded paper towels to Pez dispensers, part of the massive “Peanuts” licensing world. Some fellow cartoonists disliked the way Schulz commercialized the strip.
He dismissed the criticism, arguing that comic strips had always been commercial, starting with their invention as a way to sell newspapers, Caswell said.
Stars and royalty watch ABBA’s return in digital stage show
Jill Lawless, The Associated Press
LONDON (AP) — “ABBA Voyage” is certainly a trip.
Four decades after the Swedish pop supergroup last performed live, audiences can once again see ABBA onstage in an innovative digital concert where past and future collide.
The show opens to the public in London on Friday, the day after a red-carpet premiere attended by superfans, celebrities and Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. The guests of honor were pop royalty — the four members of ABBA, appearing in public together for the first time in years.
They were in the audience, though. Onstage at the specially built 3,000-seat ABBA Arena next to east London’s Olympic Park were a 10-piece live backing band and a digital ABBA, created using motion capture and other technology by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects firm founded by “Star Wars” director George Lucas.
The voices and movements are the real Agnetha Faltskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad — choreographed by Britain’s Wayne McGregor — but the performers onstage are digital avatars, inevitably dubbed “ABBA-tars.” In unsettlingly realistic detail, they depict the band members as they looked in their 1970s heyday — beards on the men, flowing locks on the women, velour pantsuits all around.
The result is both hightech and high camp, a glittery supernova of stupefying technology, 1970s nostalgia and pop music genius.
For many in the audience, it was almost like being taken back in time to watch ABBA perform classics including “Mamma Mia,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “SOS” and “Dancing Queen.” The peppy 90-minute set also includes tracks from “Voyage,” the reunion album the band released last year.
It’s a fusion of tribute act and 3D concert movie that transcends that description. At times, it was possible to forget this wasn’t a live performance, though when the backing singers stepped forward to belt out “Does Your Mother Know,” a surge of live-music energy shot through the arena.
The four band members — two married couples during ABBA’s heyday, though now long divorced — got a rapturous ovation when they took a bow at the end of last Thursday’s show, 50 years after they formed ABBA, and 40 years after they stopped performing live. Watching one’s younger self perform must be a strange sensation, but the band members, now in their 70s, said they were delighted by the show. “I never knew I had such amazing moves,” Ulvaeus said. Lyngstad agreed: “I thought I was quite good, but I’m even better.” Ulvaeus said the audience reaction was the most gratifying part of the experience. “There’s an emotional connection between the avatars and the audience,” he said. “That’s the fantastic thing.”
Producers bill the show as “revolutionary.” Time will tell. Like the first audiences to watch a talking motion picture a century ago, attendees may leave wondering whether they are watching a gimmick or the future.
Members of ABBA arrive for the ABBA Voyage concert at the ABBA Arena in London. > AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali There’s an emotional connection between the avatars and the audience. That’s the fantastic thing.
In fact, Björn Ulvaeus, ABBA The Times of London reviewer Will Hodgkinson The voices judged the show “essentially an ABBA singalong and movements are with added sound and light show,” though he the real members called the effect “captivating.” Writing in The of ABBA, but the Guardian, Alexis Petridis called the concert “jawperformers onstage dropping” and said “it’s so successful that it’s hard are digital avatars. not to imagine other artists following suit.” Gimmick or genius, “ABBA Voyage” is booking in London until May 2023, with a world tour planned after that. The fans who attended Thursday’s show are just delighted ABBA is back. “I’m so excited,” said Kristina Hagman, a Swede who has been a fan since the 1970s. “I was bullied so much because you were not allowed to like ABBA at that time because it was so commercial,” she said. “But now we are taking revenge.”
‘Triangle of Sadness’ wins Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Fest
Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
CANNES, France (AP) — Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s class warfare comedy “Triangle of Sadness” won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival last Saturday, giving Ostlund one of cinema’s most prestigious prizes for the second time.
Ostlund, whose art-world send-up “The Square” took the Palme in 2017, pulled off the rare feat of winning Cannes’ top award for back-to-back films. “Triangle of Sadness,” featuring Woody Harrelson as a Marxist yacht captain and a climactic scene with rampant vomiting, pushes the satire even further.
“We wanted after the screening (for people) to go out together and have something to talk about,” said Ostlund. “All of us agree that the unique thing with cinema is that we’re watching together. So, we have to save something to talk about, but we should also have fun and be entertained.”
The awards were selected by a nine-member jury headed by French actor Vincent Lindon and presented Saturday in a closing ceremony inside Cannes’ Grand Lumière Theater.
The jury’s second prize, the Grand Prix, was shared between the Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s tender boyhood drama “Close,” about two 13-year-old boys whose bond is tragically separated after their intimacy is mocked by schoolmates; and French filmmaking legend Claire Denis’ “Stars at Noon,” a Denis Johnson adaptation starring Margaret Qualley as a journalist in Nicaragua.
The directing prize went to South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (”Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden”) for his twisty noir “Decision to Leave,” a romance fused with a police procedural.
Korean star Song Kang Ho was named best actor for his performance in Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film “Broker,” about a Korean family seeking a home for an abandoned baby.
“I’d like to thank all those who appreciate Korean cinema,” said Song, who also starred in Bong Joon Ho’s Palme d’Or winning film “Parasite” in Cannes three years ago.
Best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi for her performance as a journalist in Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider,” a true-crime thriller about a serial killer targeting sex workers in the Iranian religious city of Mashhad. Violent and graphic, “Holy Spider” wasn’t permitted to shoot in Iran and instead was made in Jordan. Accepting the award, Ebrahimi said the film depicts “everything that’s impossible to show in Iran.”
The jury prize was split between the friendship tale “The Eight Mountains,” by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix Van Groeningen, and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s “EO,” about a donkey’s journey across a pitiless modern Europe. “I would like to thank my donkeys,” said Skolimowski, who proceeded to thank all six donkeys used in the film by name. The jury also awarded a special award for the 75th Cannes to Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time Palme-winners and long a regular presence at the festival, for their immigrant drama “Tori and Lokita.” Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh took best screenplay at Cannes for “Boy From Heaven,” a thriller set in Cairo’s Al-Azhar Mosque.
The award for best first film, the Camera d’Or, went to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell for “War Pony,” a drama about the Pine Ridge Reservation made in collaboration with Oglala Lakota and Sicangu Lakota citizens. Last weekend’s closing ceremony brought to a
In fact, close a Cannes that attempted to fully resuscitate the annual France extravaganza that was canceled in 2020 by the pandemic and saw modest crowds This year, last year. This year’s festival also unspooled against the biggest the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, which sparked Hollywood films red-carpet protests and a dialogue about the at Cannes — purpose of cinema in wartime. “Elvis,”“Top Gun: Last year, the French body horror thriller Maverick,”“Three “Titane” took the top prize at Cannes, making Thousand Years of director Julia Decournau only the second female Longing” — played filmmaker ever to win the Palme. In 2019, Bong outside Cannes’ Joon Ho’s “Parasite” triumphed in Cannes before competition lineup doing the same at the Academy Awards. of 21 films. This year, the biggest Hollywood films at Cannes — “Elvis,”“Top Gun: Maverick,”“Three Thousand Years of Longing” — played outside Cannes’ competition lineup of 21 films. But their presence helped restore some of Cannes’ glamour after the pandemic scaled down the festival for the last two years.
Writer/director Ruben Ostlund, winner of the Palme d’Or for ‘Triangle of Sadness’. > Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)
Ruben Ostlund Film director
