Veggie prices in the news
Universities try hard to get their faculty quoted in the media, which happens sometimes through news about our research and more often when reporters call for comment about current events. In my case that happens most often when food prices rise, with a good example being last Thursday when government data showed how wholesale vegetable prices spiked up in July.
Anyone paying attention to American life is looking out for price rises caused by new import taxes and worker deportations, and economists also worry about the lower value of the dollar combined with higher interest rates caused by government borrowing for consumption instead of investment. There is abundant evidence that those factors will soon show up in a combination of higher prices and worse job prospects, a gloomy condition known as stagflation.
Lots of people claimed that the recent veggie-flation might to partly due to tariffs and deportations, but to me the data just looked like random noise. What’s a responsible food economist to do?
The first outlet to call for comment on Thursday was public radio’s Marketplace evening news show — for them I said this seemed like a normal spike in “a cardiac chart at the doctor’s office“. Of course I said lots of other things too, but their other quotes were from faculty elsewhere who were more willing to say that the price rise might have been caused by tariffs and deportations… which is true enough, as explained well by David Ortega from MSU and Mark Blyth from Brown. Another excellent explanation came in comments from the Friedman School’s Parke Wilde in an ABC News story.
The other reporter who called me was from Boston’s CBS TV station, with great footage from shopping at Haymarket and some more explanation from me in this news story about vegetable prices in Massachusetts.
Now it’s Saturday morning before the new semester, and I’m in a teaching mood so thought I’d make the datapalooza slide below.
As you can see, the wholesale producer price index for veggies that just spiked up does look kind of like an EKG, compared to the smoother other price indexes. When price rises caused by tariffs and deportations really get started later this year, the media might be too distracted by other stuff to tell the story — but as long as we have BLS and FRED online you can refresh the chart below with the latest data by clicking on this link to updated versions of this veggie prices chart.
