This week in 1990, Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap song in history to top the US charts. If you haven’t heard it, you’ve been living under a rock for the last thirty years. Vanilla Ice, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, wrote the song in 1983 when he was just 16 years old.

 The lyrics reflect that youth. And we’re not going to lie, they are pretty bad. Take for instance, the horrific lines “Quick to the point, to the point, no fakin’; cookin’ MCs like a pound of bacon.” Or even worse, “My style's like a chemical spill; feasible rhymes you can vision and feel.” Not exactly the stuff of legend. In fact, the song ends with the most cringe of any line you’ve ever heard: “Word to your mother.”

Another tidbit about the song is that it was one of the first songs that sampled freely without crediting the original artist—it’s a beat for beat match of Queen’s “Under Pressure.” This has caused the song to be widely mocked throughout the years, but if we’re being honest, the song also brought hip hop to a much larger, mainstream audience in a time when hip hop was looking for mainstream credibility.

This month’s economic indicators are a bit like that — sampling from another economy in another time (namely, the 1970s) and bringing inflation to a wider audience who has never experience price increase above a 3% cost-of-living adjustment.  

What you’ll notice right off the bat is Rapid City’s record-low unemployment (1.9%) and continued strength in consumer spending (almost $860 million in one month).  But you’ll also notice wages aren’t necessarily keeping pace like they did a few months ago.  This wouldn’t be a bad thing if prices were falling, but that’s not happening.  Housing prices and the Consumer Price Index have barely dipped. 

This continues to bode poorly for the national and regional economies. Just this week, the Federal Reserve announced rate hikes to their highest levels since 2008 in another attempt to tame the monster of inflation.

It has to work, doesn’t it? It can’t go on like this forever, can it? Runaway inflation combined with ever-increasing costs of borrowing? Maybe we will even see the first sings of slowdown by Christmas?

Your guess is as good as ours, but we’d say it’s pretty likely. We’re already seeing corporate layoffs in the tens of thousands. Even Amazon has paused hiring. And when Amazon pauses hiring, that’s probably a leading indicator as any.