what if I told you there was one thing,
one item that could give us a pretty good idea
about what's happening with inflation and the economy over the
past few years. Yeah, the price of chicken
wings plunged at the start of the pandemic back in
2020 when the economy shut down, people stopped eating
out and everybody was spending less money on food and
just about everything else. So now the people selling
the chickens started making fewer chickens plus workers in the
factories were getting covid, it was harder to hire
people. There was even a bird flu. This
is the kind of thing we're talking about when we
use the term supply chain truck, supply chain issues
, supply chain issues, supply chain crisis. But
as all this is happening over here with our chicken
suppliers, suddenly the demand side of the equation starts
to change, the economy comes roaring back. People
spend money again, go to restaurants, order out
and they want their wings. We get big time
chick inflation. The price of wings surges back to
where it was before the pandemic and then keeps rising
. But now over the past few months wing production
has picked back up, prices are coming back down
as the economy cools off. And of course wings
are just part of the story. Things like rent
and health care are still getting more expensive. But
oil and gas and lumber and wheat have largely been
getting cheaper since the summer. And on average across
the U. S. Even though prices are higher
than last year, there's growing evidence that inflation could
be past its beak.