While swings in the prices of food and fuel contributed to this decline, both narrower price indexes excluding those items and broader ones including all goods and services produced in the United States also paint a portrait of continued progress toward price stability. Businesses, for the most part, were able to pay these higher real wages while still increasing their earnings.
The danger is that enterprises which are in fact insolvent continue to receive credit and therefore do not disappear from the market, whilst the growth of healthy companies is stunted. We also talk about zombie firms and evergreen lending in this regard. But savers are also amongst the casualties of the low-interest-rate setting.