It means price can't go up anymore because ppl can't afford, businesses need to slack ppl off to stay afloat, which make ppl poorer and even less capable of buying stuff.
I think people don't understand how much worse it could be. The economy isn't great but is nothing like talking to my grandparents/great grandparents about the Great Depression (which had periods of high deflation. You can search for deflation in this article if you're curious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression or look at this article comparing it with inflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Compared_with_inflation).
I'm not saying things are great or anything about how the Great Depression specifically interacted with deflation (I have no idea personally) but the answer to whether we are in the scenario economists are worried about with deflation is a very clear "absolutely not". They are imagining much worse.
I think people don't understand how much worse it could be. The economy isn't great but is nothing like talking to my grandparents/great grandparents about the Great Depression
It's not great, but it's a lot closet to great than bad. Wages/incomes are high, unemployment is low. That's pretty good at least.
It is hard to judge because, at least where I live, the way things work is that there are a lot of people with informal employment, several people working delivery services or Über and the kind, jobs that do provide some income but are irregular, without security
And if you exclude those people's employment, you get a CONSIDERABLY higher unemployment rate than our national "5.3%". Especially because, per the government counting, people who gave up job hunting due to HR backwards policies, LinkedIn scams, ghost jobs and etc, my government does not count those people as unemployed. Nor does it count the homeless as unemployed. And my country has A LOT of homeless people.
So the key difference is that those people still have jobs and are still making money. The Great Depression saw unemployment rates as high as 25% in the US. Imagine if a quarter of the population was without income... people would get awfully mad and start looking for someone to blame...
It is a matter that, in my country, even people with full time jobs AND these extra incomes end up in debt just to put food on the table. Everyone around me is becoming increasingly more religious fundamentalist, mixing up blaming communists, colored people, LGBT, immigrants and atheists for everything going wrong while ignoring the agro sector which sells most of our food abroad because selling abroad they earn in dollars and euros instead of our broke currency.
We are a plague away from our own Irish Potato Famine.
I struggle considering that my country's wages are increasing faster than the inflation if most jobs are specifically exempt from the wage increase because they are irregulated jobs AND because we work 6X1 days AND it looks like we will adopt the Argentinian "your boss an pay you in food, has no hours limit and no minimum wage" attitude next year
Kind of but also not. Were you working in 2008 during the recession? The job losses and affordability issues were even worse then. Millions of jobs just deleted, millions of homes foreclosed. That's deflation. The great recession, or the great depression before our time, are periods of significant prolonged deflation. It's the worst.
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u/SuspiciousSnotling 9h ago
Deflation is worse than inflation.
It means price can't go up anymore because ppl can't afford, businesses need to slack ppl off to stay afloat, which make ppl poorer and even less capable of buying stuff.
It's a death spiral