Cnn
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For months, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the prices of tumbled eggs. It was not true then, but it’s true now.
Egg prices dropped 12.7% last month, the greatest monthly drop since 1984, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Tuesday. And they could also continue to fall this month: the USDA reported last week that a dozen large white shells were now $ 3.30 on average, down 69 cents per week before.
It is a remarkable reversal after the prices of the eggs have increased in each of the last five months – and 17 of the last five months – due to an epidemic of fatal avian flu which required the mass slaughter of the weighted hens with eggs.
“Perhaps the worst of Egggate has passed,” said CNN Tyler Schipper, an associate professor in economics and data analysis at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Nevertheless, the prices of the eggs remain considerably higher now than before the last epidemic of the flu from birds, and they cost 49.3% more last month than last month. The eggs are even more expensive than when Trump took office, according to the BLS. The prices of eggs in past Easter, which generally increases in the holiday period, were the highest for all the recorded Easter, the USDA reported.
Long before the decline of last month, Trump had praised the drop in prices of eggs as a sign that the plan of its administration to lower prices for consumers worked. In February, the USDA announced an initiative to reduce egg prices, including increased biosecurity in eggs’ laying farms, aid to farmers who have lost herds and a temporary lifting of restrictions on egg imports.
Despite the much more cautious estimate of the Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins than egg prices would normalize in summer, Trump said last month: “As you know, the cost of eggs has dropped to 93 94% since we took office.” This percentage decreases that Trump said is not close to precision – but we now know that consumer egg prices have dropped sharply when Trump has made these comments (consumer prices index was not yet away to confirm or refuse Trump’s claims).
It seems that Trump was able to talk about wholesale prices, which had dropped throughout March before normalizing in recent weeks. Nevertheless, wholesale prices fell in half – not near the figures of 90% + that Trump was cited.
Bry prices are the costs that distributors pay to farmers or intermediaries. Consumer prices are what customers pay in grocery stores. These costs generally make their way through the supply chain at a slower rate, because grocery stores can decide to maintain prices at a certain price, even when wholesale prices change, to try to recover the lost profits from previous weeks, according to Kevin Bergquist, sector director at the Wells Fargo Agro-Food Institute.
The USDA claims that consumer prices have finally dropped as the demand for eggs has decreased and that avian influenza cases have dropped. Many grocery products, including large channels like Costco, had purchases of limited customers due to the shortage of eggs.
Thus, the pretension of Trump according to which the prices of consumer eggs are decreasing is finally true – even if the time of his complaint and the wild percentages he threw was largely inaccurate.
