A new analysis of President Donald Trump's latest economic figures shows that one feature many hoped would be a bug has turned into a permanent fixture.
The latest inflation data shows that prices increased by 3.7% in September, and advanced 0.6% when compared to the previous month, which was one of the highest recent monthly increases. At the same time, wages fell by 0.5% for workers, meaning that the cost of goods is going up while the amount of money going into workers' pockets to pay for them is falling.
Jack Crosbie of Rolling Stone argued in a new analysis that this trend may be a permanent fixture of Trump's economy because of how rising gas prices are driving the trend, which he described as Trump's "final indignity."
"The only financial fix to any of this is for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again, which analysts think will be discussed at the end of October — just in time for the midterms," he wrote. "The idea to raise those rates is to stop people buying stuff, hopefully stopping some inflation. This doesn’t mean life gets easier, of course, it just means taking on a loan gets more expensive. The numbers we like go down, the numbers we don’t like go up. So goes the economic world in Trump’s second term, with no end to the trend in sight."