Inflation? Deflation?

KUCH

As a successful self employed business owner for the past 33 years, with no macro economic education, how can we have inflaton AND deflation at the same time?

Deflation: wages, interest, construction (housing related) industry, land, gas, just to name a few, etc

Inflation: taxes (huge increases and more to come), food, precious metals, insurance, health industry, utilities, etc

Anyone who says we don't have both going on right now is not seeing the whole picture.

For those with more economic savy than me, please opine. Specifically:

Did this inflation/deflation happen before the Great Depression?
Japan has seen deflation for the past 20 years, did they avoid hyperinflation because their debt was low?

dac076

More deflation than inflation now IMO. I would say the tax increases are deflationary rather than inflationary since they suppress spending and investment. I would also say
that competition in the insurance industry has held costs down. But I would add higher education costs to your inflation list (yes, I have kids in college!)

roadrunner

I think that inflation with deflation has been prevalent under our fiat money system. That is assuming that I & D are loosely refering to price changes rather than strict monetary aggregates. When housing and stock prices were generally rising (1982-2000) that was fine with most people. During that same period you could say we had generally declining prices in food, commodities, metals, etc. The switch was made and now the opposite basically occured during most of the past decade. It will continue because fiat money has to chase some asset/service/good. The masses are not content to hold paper money and see it lose value over the longer term.

Commodities tend to run opposite to currencies, stocks, etc. That might appear to be inflationary in commodities and deflationary in paper-based assets. We've seen educational costs only go up while home prices and reacted in either direction (rose in the 1970's commodities run yet fell during this past one).

roadrunner

Justacommeman

yes