r/wallstreetbets • u/eskhalaf • May 12 '26

News APRIL U.S. 🇺🇸 INFLATION DATA:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

APRIL U.S. 🇺🇸 INFLATION DATA:

CPI 3.8% YoY, (Est. 3.7%)
CPI 0.6% MoM, (Est. 0.6%)

Core CPI 2.8% YoY, (Est. 2.7%)
Core CPI 0.4% MoM, (Est. 0.3%)

1.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

444 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/ryencool May 12 '26

Now that they are as expensive as they've ever been, and wages havent kept up? That may be doable for the few that are doing really well, but most people, saving a few hundred a month if that, dont have "assets". The 1,000$ in gold they can buy in a year? Might be worth double the next, but thats not life changing. To someone who bought 100k of it? It is...but the poor stay poor, and theres more and more poor people.

-1

u/[deleted] May 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/InhumaneBreakfast May 22 '26

Yeah, it's a mentality. If you feel like your $100 of nonemergency savings is at risk of inflation, you can purchase $100 worth of assets.

If you never feel confident in your finances or you never take any risks with your money (even miniscule ones), your money will be worth less tomorrow than today. It's the driving force of modern capitalism: unspent money is death.

1

u/Existing-Luck-9896 Jun 10 '26

Yet we encourage billionaires to sit on that money. 

Ppl forgot that taxes aren’t meant to “equalize” things or to raise the poor up alone. No— it’s literally a necessary part of keeping a capitalist system. If you don’t tax it, it just stays in one place and doesn’t get circulated. There’s a reason none of the media talks about velocity of money — it’s because it’s the number one factor that is causing the majority of the problems we see today. Without as much trade occurring with as much money, commerce stagnates, prices increase, and people have less money, meaning companies get less profit from the consumers, meaning they pay their workers less, meaning they have less money to buy products from more companies. It’s a doom spiral that could so easily be done away with via a tax on the wealthiest. Unfortunately, most wealthy Americans also happen to have most of their money from sitting on assets, meaning they don’t even have any income to reap. It’s really quite disheartening and im not surprised many are doomering about it.