Ask HN: How much of inflation is caused by supply rather than demand issues?

https://www.freightos.com/freight-resources/coronavirus-upda...

I've seen so much discussion and threads being overly reductive about inflation, essentially the end prices of goods are a function of their inputs and the competition for those goods. It's important to understand that you have many non-linear effects overlapping to create the final goods price. For example, chip shortages meant inspite thousands of physical cars being finished, they couldn't be shipped for lacking a few components. There's nothing more money can do about that. But cars are essential, so the price of used cars exploded in response.

This is just one example of hundreds of different, overlapping issues that coronavirus brought to the supply side picture. At this point in the picture, much of the service side of the economy was physically shut e.g. you couldn't go to bars. Revenge travel, eating out etc. created a crowding out effect and drove prices higher there when they did open.

The billion dollar question is whether or not we continue to see this crowding / revenge effect or in fact people just have more money than you think and are simply spending it. There's mountains of data on both sides of this debate, if you look at consumer credit it seems to be increasing (people can't afford?), but savings rates also remain stubbornly high (but have money?). In spite of price increases, consumer demand remains very high (look at retail sales) and employment makes new record highs and JOLTS continues to be through the roof.

It's not a simple puzzle as many people seem to suggest.

PS. Don't roast me, I'm not defending the practice, just the definition of economic rationality.

There are also demand factors as well, but most of what we are seeing is monetary in origin, raising interest rate is also somewhat "demand" driven, in that the big trigger there was the market for buying MBS (packages of loans mostly made by banks and S&L) market froze and then spiked up significantly.

Capital destruction doesn't have to be intentional. Hurricanes, fires, floods, wars, and pandemics can destroy capital. A bunch of chickens being killed due to bird flu is an example of capital destruction. Your house being destroyed due to a flood is capital destruction. Bananas rotting in a warehouse because the truck driver decided to take a vacation day is capital destruction.

Of course, arson and war can also destroy capital, and those are intentional. Policy can also destroy capital; e.g., a tariff that decreases international trade reduces the value of shipping containers; that destroys capital even if the shipping containers still get used (at a lower rate).

Rant:

No one cares about pushing around definitions of words; what they want to know is why they have to pay more for stuff! For this reason, the Austrian definition of inflation is kind of idiotic and imo often used in bad faith.

Why? Because most people understand inflation to mean "things are getting more expensive". That's the normal definition not only in mainstream economics but also in the lay vernacular.

So then an Austrian tells you that "inflation is monetary" and you infer that "the reason for increasing prices must be money printing". But that's an errant deduction! The Austrian is simply axiomatically defining a term in a non-standard way. In particular: the "inflation is monetary" is literally just choosing a weird way to define inflation, NOT making an actual empirical claim about the reason that e.g. egg prices have increased!

If you accept the definitional slight of hand and don't realize the silly game of axioms you've been recruited into, then you conclude that money printing is always the reason for increasing prices, even though not even the most staunch Austrian has the balls to make such a wildly broad claim ("oh, no, those prices increased because of capital destruction, not inflation!").

So far we just have a silly confusion. The pernicious thing is that the conclusions that you draw due to this stupid definitional game happen to support the often entirely self-interested policy preferences of (usually wealthy, and in a particular way) Austrians.

To your parent post's credit, they explain what they mean when they say that inflation is monetary; ie, that you cannot conclude from their assertion that inflation is the reason that prices are increasing. But generally I find the game that gets played with the definition of inflation (it's always monetary!!1!) extremely aggravating, since literally everyone else in the conversation understands that inflation means a general increase in prices. It's the same sort of pernicious definition game that people play when they say that that US is a republic and not a democracy.

And, in fact, you'll find that most Austrians themselves don't even understand that "inflation is monetary" is just a definitional choice, not an actual empirical claim about why prices increase. Or, when they do, they will freely move between the two definitions in a way that is -- even if not in bad faith -- an actively misleading use of rhetoric.