Nick Manteris

In 1971 the median worker needed 6,400 hours of labor to buy the median home. By 2024: 14,000 hours. Same work. Same effort. The house costs twice the labor it used to. The house didn't change. The hours did.

@unusual_whales Warsh names the symptom. The mechanism is upstream: new money enters through the financial sector and reaches wages last. The regressivity is not a side effect of inflation. It is what producing inflation does.

Inflation is “the most regressive tax that anyone in Washington could come up with,” Kevin Warsh has said. “If you were trying to do the most harm to the least well off among us, inflation would be the way to do it."

@Geenimetsuri @TaviCosta Nominal peso supply still grew about 11%. The chart shows dollar-denominated supply, so it combines money-supply growth and currency devaluation in one number. Real contraction depends on whether inflation outran 11%. Under Milei it almost certainly did.

@thecostofwork @TaviCosta The currency has devalued 20 percent over the year. When the drop in USD value has been 11 percent, what does that mean has happened to the actual money supply?

Argentina is the only country where money supply is contracting at a double-digit rate. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues to expand credit with little to no monetary discipline. None of us own enough hard assets. tavicosta.substack.com/p/macro-update

@Barchart Financial assets and GDP measure the same economy at two points. The first receives new money. The second adjusts later. 6.7x is the distance between them. The two prior peaks (2000, 2007) closed quickly into recession. The QE-era peak has been opening for 17 years.

Wall Street outgrowing Main Street at the fastest pace in history 🚨🚨

Wall Street and Main Street aren't in competition. They measure the same economy at two points: the financial sector receives new money first, GDP adjusts later. 6.7x is the lag. The two prior peaks (2000, 2007) closed into recession. This peak has been opening for 17 years.

@Hedgeye Fertilizer priced in dollars on global commodity markets. Crops priced in negotiations with four downstream firms. The farmer absorbs both ends. 78% is what that math produces. Same pattern compressing wages elsewhere. Different industry, same math.

🚜 Farms in the south are struggling: 78% of Southern farmers say they can’t afford all required fertilizer this year, the highest of any region.  The South is exposed for two reasons: crop mix and pre-booking behavior. Just 19% of Southern producers pre-booked fertilizer ahead of the season, vs. 30% in the Northeast, 31% in the West, and 67% in the Midwest.  Cotton, rice, and peanut growers, largely concentrated in the South, barely locked anything in before fertilizer prices skyrocketed. Only 13% of cotton growers and 9% of peanut growers pre-booked.  Those are also the most fertilizer-intensive crops on the board. Rice runs $1,308/acre to produce, peanuts $1,166, and cotton $943 vs. $658 for soybeans and $396 for wheat. U.S. farm sector losses have exceeded $50 billion across the past three crop years. Nearly all (94%) farmers say their financial situation has worsened or stayed the same vs. last year. Farms are getting squeezed.

@thecostofwork/note/c-253216636" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@thecostofwork…

On Substack, Stoller explains why Spirit Airlines died. Antitrust, fuel, the legacy carriers lobbying against a rescue they once accepted. What the analysis doesn't ask: why two airline classes existed at all. Spirit was what wages could still afford. The fuel shock didn't just kill an airline. It killed access.

@EPBResearch This chart removes government transfers and measures what work alone pays. It hasn't grown in 15 months. The headline income numbers look better because they include stimulus and tax credits. Strip those out and the trend is falling. The transfers covered it. The work didn't.

Real personal income per capita hasn't grown in 15 months. It's now $3,267 below the 2009-2020 trend. It keeps getting worse for the average American, and Main Street can feel it.

Before 1971 the Shiller PE averaged around 15 and reverted to it. After 1971 the baseline shifted upward and never came back. The market isn't just expensive. The unit it's priced in got cheaper. Both are true at the same time and most of the conversation is about only one of them.

Shiller PE Ratio hits 2nd highest level of all-time, only slightly behind the Dot Com Bubble 🚨🚨🚨

New essay on The Cost of Work: thecostofwork.substack.com/p/the-house-th…

In 1971 the median worker needed 6,400 hours of labor to buy the median home. By 2024: 14,000 hours. Same work. Same effort. The house costs twice the labor it used to. The house didn't change. The hours did.

The economists are right. Rent control doesn't work. But the survey skips the prior question: what made rents unaffordable enough that rent control became politically necessary? Rents rose from 2.4x income to over 5x across twenty countries with different housing policies. Rent control is the wrong answer to a real problem. The survey measures the answer. Nobody is asking about the cause.

There are few things economists agree on more than opposing rent control. A survey of top economists found almost universal agreement that rent control: 1. Wouldn't make middle-income Americans better off 2. Would reduce apartment supply 3. Wouldn't reduce income inequality

@Barchart The bond market isn't predicting a spike. It's pricing in what the Fed's own history suggests: the target is 2%, the average since 1971 is 3.8%, and the gap between promise and delivery has run in the same direction for fifty years. The market is reading the pattern.

Inflation about to take off according to the Bond Market 🚨🚨

The post lists three ways to pay the debt. None of them is the way it's actually being paid. The fourth option (create the money and let the purchasing power loss cover it) is the one that's been running since 1971. No confiscation required. No vote either. $7.2 billion a day, funded by everyone who holds dollars.

🇺🇸 Here's what $39 trillion in debt really means: If we confiscated every dollar of U.S. corporate profit ($3.8T/year), it would take over 10 years to pay off. Sell every ounce of gold ever mined: $32 trillion. Still $7 trillion short. Liquidate every Bitcoin in existence on top of that: $33.5 trillion. Still $5.5 trillion short. If we confiscated every dollar of federal tax revenue ($5.3T/year), it would take over 7 years to pay off, assuming zero spending. The debt is 71% of every home in America, or 30% of every publicly traded company on Earth. The debt grows by $7.2 billion a day, or $84,000 a second. This is a problem.

@athenaeumbc I'm doing my best to pick up the slack. I've read 4 this month

Fewer than half of US adults read a book last year. Even fewer read an actual novel, and the trend is looking worse still for teenagers. Why is nobody talking about this??

That's the extraction you can see. There's another one that doesn't appear on any payslip. The euro has lost roughly 85% of its purchasing power since 1971. The French worker paying 59% in visible taxes is also paying an invisible one through every euro they hold. Nobody adds them together.

This is probably the wildest data point you'll see today. The cost to a French employer of a net pay of €39k is a staggering €95k. How is this even possible? Can you imagine the incentive to replace French jobs with AI and robots? Get some popcorn.

@esaagar AI capex is part of it. The larger pattern: aggregate numbers have been diverging from household experience for fifty years. GDP measures total output. It doesn't measure who receives it. The sentiment isn't wrong. It's measuring something the GDP wasn't built to see.

A lot of people are mystified at how the market/gdp keeps humming along when consumer sentiment is at an all time low The reason why is big tech cos are spending 3/4 trillion dollars just THIS YEAR on AI

@jasminewsun Technology has been generating abundance for fifty years. The median household received less of it every decade. AI will be the same pattern on a larger scale. The underclass won't be permanent because of AI. It'll be permanent because of where the gains go.

Most people I know in AI think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I spent the last 3 months talking to dozens of researchers, economists, and policy experts about AI's impact on work; including reps from every frontier lab and several Congressional offices. Unfortunately, I was not reassured. The AI industry is raising the alarm, but can't change course. These companies' core business model relies on the disruption they are warning about: their faith in full automation only makes them go faster. Policymakers are waking up, but still paralyzed by data and debates. Econ wonks disagree on plenty, but even the limited scenario looks like a "painful transition" that will disempower millions of workers. But an "underclass" is not inevitable, but rather a societal choice — and one we can and should stop. Instead of waiting for impact, we should start planning now to support workers through AI disruption. Whether policymakers can assuage concerns about economic security may determine if we get to reap AI's gains at all. New from me for @NYTOpinion. I put a ton into researching what I think may be the biggest topic of the year, so hope you read it (gift link here!) nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opi…

@byHeatherLong Zoom the chart out to 1971. The savings rate was 12%. The decline to 3.6% isn't a post-COVID squeeze. It's a fifty-year trend. Saving loses purchasing power every year. Assets outrun the erosion. The rational response to that incentive is to stop saving. That's what happened.

Important: The US savings rate fell to 3.6% in March. That's the lowest since fall 2022 (the "revenge spend" era). And it's frankly one of the lower readings of all time. American households are getting squeezed. Many are not able to save right now as they face ongoing high costs for gas, electricity, and healthcare. Bottom line: There's less cushion if a downturn or economic slowdown occurs.