What percentage of meatpackers are unionized, and thus in a position to call on union leadership to support a strike? Jeez, what percentage of meatpackers are non citizen immigrants? Capital seems to be fighting and winning its rights to reestablish neo bracero programmes all the time.
How can Greenspan seriously be concerned with wage led inflation (as opposed to inflation and ominious debt structures from the wealth effect) since the rate at which real wages are increasing has been falling even as the unemployment rate further declines?
Greenspan needs to engineer a soft landing for the stock market. To do that he is nudging interest rates up now, which gives him the added advantage of greater room to use monetary policy in the wake of a not so soft landing. It is easier for Greenspan to do this in the idiom of fighting wage led inflation than to openly admit that he is trying to ward off the greatest equity crash in history, which will bring the world economy down with it.
Yours, Rakesh