Why is an economic depression bad for consumers even though prices are cheaper?
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>…bad for consumers even though prices are cheaper?
The shortest answer is that low prices aren’t the primary metric of what is good or bad for the consumer, nor are they by themselves a good metric for how good or bad the state of the economy is.
If the prices are low because nobody can afford anything, the fact that they are low doesn’t matter. During depressions, unemployment is high, so people generally afford less, so it is irrelevant that prices are cheaper because unemployed people or people with very restricted incomes can’t afford the lower prices anyway.
Economic depressions come from contractions in the money supply, especially long-term contractions. This is what ultimately forces prices to decrease. You also need to take into account people’s level of income and the rates of unemployment and the rates of inflation and the price of housing and food and the levels of debt. Fixating on any one metric will lead you to misleading conclusions.
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