The Hamrick Brief

This week’s inflation dual reports delivered some encouraging news: inflation cooled more than expected. Tuesday’s CPI showed consumer prices fell 0.4% in June, bringing annual headline inflation down to 3.5% from 4.2%. A day later, the June PPI reinforced the trend. Wholesale prices fell 0.3% last month, and May’s initially reported 1.1% increase was revised down to 0.6%. On an annual basis, wholesale inflation slowed to 5.5% from 6.0% in May. The Hamrick Brief is a reader-supported publication.

This week: Along with the lead, we look at the economy, including a softer jobs report colliding with a newly hawkish Fed, the housing market underperforming, and the anniversary of Disneyland’s challenging 1955 opening offers a lesson in what real innovation and adaptation look like. Plus, my own road from credit card debt to a strong credit score, a lesson on how we can change. Volatility. Disruption. Innovation. Adaptation. The Hamrick Brief is a reader-supported publication.

The Lead: June’s jobs report might look better than it really is, so we go underneath the headline. Plus, a housing market that’s stuck rather than booming or busting, what the Founders’ own crushing debts say about the price of independence, Michelle Singletary’s grandmother’s rules for financial peace, a debt myth worth retiring, and a personal look back at 40 years since I first walked into an AP newsroom, when “smartphone” wasn’t yet a word.

The economic numbers we track are measures of scale. GDP. Payrolls. The S&P 500 stock index. The inflation rate. Like the economy’s equivalent of the complicated cross currents of the ocean, they tell us about different dynamics which, taken together, are difficult to fully fathom and process. A new study from Gallup and Edward Jones asked something different from what we often measure: How fulfilled do Americans feel about their financial lives? Only 16 percent qualify as financially fulfilled.

Consumer sentiment just hit its lowest point in 75 years of recorded history. Not during the financial crisis. Not during the pandemic. Now. That number is this week’s starting point. It feeds into something bigger: why so many Americans feel economically left behind even when the headline data says otherwise.

The Treading Water Economy: Why Stability Does Not Feel Like Progress There is a growing disconnect between top-line economic stability and the reality of household finances. New polling data from YouGov gives that disconnect some useful shape. Fifty-five percent of Americans say they are either just about keeping up or falling behind financially. Compared to the 21 countries surveyed, the United States ranks near the bottom on financial momentum.

I had a close-up view of politics early, through no intention of my own. My father worked for the Associated Press and later as a small-town newspaper editor. Sometime during my childhood, watching events up close or from afar, I developed an awareness of people who inhabit the political universe. I eventually spent more years at the AP than my dad, covering and meeting remarkable people, leaders who shaped policy, markets, and lives. That proximity has been a privilege.

Why this week’s inflation news amounts to a gut punch for consumers A double dose of unwelcome inflation data dropped this week, and the numbers hit close to home for anyone filling a gas tank, buying groceries, or just trying to get from point A to point B. The April CPI and PPI reports landed back-to-back, and together they tell a familiar story: prices are rising faster than paychecks, and the pressure isn’t coming from one corner of the economy. It’s everywhere.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Polonius warns in Hamlet, a man famous for dispensing advice nobody asked for. William Shakespeare, it turns out, did both and kept excellent records. He left behind 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and a financial life that would hold up just fine today. He bought prime real estate, held a stake in his own theatre, and showed no hesitation in pursuing debts in court. The tension between timeless advice and real-world behavior is not new.

Rates on hold, at least for now The Federal Reserve has left interest rates unchanged, but the bigger story is perhaps a meaningful, some might say hawkish, shift in its outlook. The benchmark rate sticks at 3.5%-3.75%. Both he and his colleagues pledged to win the war on inflation, or in Fed speak, “price stability”. Of 19 officials, nine signalled the possibility of at least one rate hike by the end of the year.