Today's Top Stories From the Breitbart News Desk

If you were planning on stocking up on toilet paper, paper towels, or bottled water as we head into the darker months, you have missed your opportunity. Costco announced that it is going to start to limit how much of these items each customer can purchase. The company explained that it is dealing with significant supply chain disruptions, and there just isn't enough to go around without rationing.

The return of the toilet paper shortage is a clear sign that the economy just is not recovering as smoothly as many had expected. The supply chain disruptions were supposed to be temporary growing pains as the economy reopened after vaccinations. But instead of fading, they appear to be getting worse.

At this week's FOMC meeting, Jerome Powell attributed the upward revisions to the inflation forecasts of Fed officials to greater supply bottlenecks, which he said may be “with us for the next few months and into the next year.” As Michelle Meyer at Bank of America pointed out in a recent note to clients, supply remains constrained for both goods and labor, and there is not much sign of the constraints easing.

Which makes it more than a bit weird that the Fed's economic projections for next year have inflation falling all the way down to 2.2 percent (which is barely a tenth of a point higher than they saw it in June.) Jeremy Seigel of the Wharton School on Friday told CNBC that he doesn't find that forecast credible. "Everyone knows we're going to have much more inflation," he said.

Next week we'll get a test of whether everyone knows that when both the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index and the Conference's Board's consumer confidence index are released. At the end of the week, we'll get actual inflation data in the form of the Personal Consumption Price Index. This is expected to rise 0.3 percent month over month, a tick down from the previous month's 0.4 percent. That, however, may be too optimistic. Given the supply shortages, we'd take the over on PCE inflation.

– Alex Marlow & John Carney
Breitbart News Network