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It’s been maddening to watch people call price-gouging “inflation”, honestly.
That’s not fucking inflation when someone in the supply chain made things more expensive and pocketed the difference as a wider profit margin; it’s the symptom of non-enforcement of antitrust laws.
I mean, most foodstuffs markets (in the supply chain between farm and grocer or farm -> restaurant) are controlled by very few people or corporations; when the farmers get less for their products but the grocer must pay more for them, that’s not inflation. It’s price-gouging, the symptom of the kinds of market failures that follow regulatory failures to prevent corporate mergers that would reduce competition in those markets.
When you look at food, fuel, housing, the enshittification of basically everything, the acquisition of yesterday’s hot-fresh-streaming services and re-packaging them to be just as predatory as the cable was when you cut the cord and went to streaming- it’s all what we get when private equity owns a piece of everything and they’re running it all to squeeze more out of everyone they can, and they also ensure regulators don’t do a damned thing about it.
There was once a time when regulators had the will to block corporate mergers, and they had the will to tax windfall profits at 100%.
If inflation isn’t based on most prices increasing… What is it based on?
It’s the devaluation of currency that happens when too much of it chases too few goods in the marketplace. It’s purely a monetary thing, you get that when the supply of money grows more quickly than the value of real goods in the economy does.
Ideally, we print money (and take it out of circulation) at a pace that keeps the money supply more or less balanced to the value of available goods and services in the economy. If we were to print too much money, or not take enough out of circulation (note: paying taxes does this; when you pay taxes the money doesn’t go into some account somewhere, it’s used to zero out the bonds issued to create it), the amount of money in circulation would become greater than the amount of real valuable goods in the economy. When that happens, the resulting bidding contest to secure those goods (after all, money doesn’t have intrinsic value, it’s only good for buying things that do) drives up the price of those goods in monetary terms.
It’s been maddening to watch people call price-gouging “inflation”, honestly.
That’s not fucking inflation when someone in the supply chain made things more expensive and pocketed the difference as a wider profit margin; it’s the symptom of non-enforcement of antitrust laws.
I mean, most foodstuffs markets (in the supply chain between farm and grocer or farm -> restaurant) are controlled by very few people or corporations; when the farmers get less for their products but the grocer must pay more for them, that’s not inflation. It’s price-gouging, the symptom of the kinds of market failures that follow regulatory failures to prevent corporate mergers that would reduce competition in those markets.
When you look at food, fuel, housing, the enshittification of basically everything, the acquisition of yesterday’s hot-fresh-streaming services and re-packaging them to be just as predatory as the cable was when you cut the cord and went to streaming- it’s all what we get when private equity owns a piece of everything and they’re running it all to squeeze more out of everyone they can, and they also ensure regulators don’t do a damned thing about it.
There was once a time when regulators had the will to block corporate mergers, and they had the will to tax windfall profits at 100%.
If inflation isn’t based on most prices increasing… What is it based on?
It’s the devaluation of currency that happens when too much of it chases too few goods in the marketplace. It’s purely a monetary thing, you get that when the supply of money grows more quickly than the value of real goods in the economy does.
Ideally, we print money (and take it out of circulation) at a pace that keeps the money supply more or less balanced to the value of available goods and services in the economy. If we were to print too much money, or not take enough out of circulation (note: paying taxes does this; when you pay taxes the money doesn’t go into some account somewhere, it’s used to zero out the bonds issued to create it), the amount of money in circulation would become greater than the amount of real valuable goods in the economy. When that happens, the resulting bidding contest to secure those goods (after all, money doesn’t have intrinsic value, it’s only good for buying things that do) drives up the price of those goods in monetary terms.