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Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

theguardian.com

251–260 of 316 posts

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#251
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, you can also (selectively) increase taxes to take out excessive money supply. In the case of profit-driven inflation, you could tax excess profits.

This (being a MMT model). It's interesting to compare the phrase above something like "good inflation control is to grow the economy to match [the amount of money in the economy]" whereas just removing the money would also work.

Wasn't really aware that this is MMT (I think it follows just from the nature of money as a loan), but.. I don't think matching growth to the amount of money in economy is always a good idea, especially when we are talking about a deliberate recession.

To me, there are two economies - the "real" one, which is what goods and services people produce, and what material inputs they need, and a "virtual" one, which describes savings, loans, the flow of money, and all the property relationships people have.

Normally both are mostly in sync (because trade is bidirectional, flow of goods and services one way, and flow of money and property the other way), but in the case of inflation, you have nominally less goods and services to flow than you have of money (might be caused for different reasons, money being injected, supply shock, etc.).

Now, when economists talk about decreasing grow to match money supply in the economy (through e.g. higher interest rates), what they really mean is to restricting the real economic flow of goods and services in order to match the virtual flow of financing.

The problem with the idea is, the virtual economy is the thing that should really be fixed, not the real one. Breaking the real economy implies that means of production will have to be rebuilt at some point in the future to match the demand again; for example, if you close a factory, and let everybody go, it will be additional effort in the future to start the factory again, rehire the qualified people, and re(dis)cover the institutional knowledge lost in the process.

Whereas adjusting the virtual economy means just changing people's expectations, because that's what money (and other finance assets) are, a share of goods and services obtainable in the future. I had this much money, and I expected to buy 20 eggs for what I got, but it was suddenly discovered that real economy is not able to provide everybody with the money to spend on eggs with 20 eggs, but only say 10 eggs. So my expectations of the future have to change, in order for virtual economy to be adjusted.

So I would argue, breaking the real economy to match the broken virtual economy is always worse for the society as a whole in the long-term, because that means that the real production will have to be rebuilt, instead of just adjusting everybody's expectations to a new reality.

The reason why (neoliberal) economists are in love with the idea of recession rather than inflation is, of course, political. They don't want expectations to be adjusted, because that means all the rich people (and other people with financial assets and other savings) will become poorer and will have to reenter the investment competition again. While people who mostly live from labor (who are often borrowers in the modern economy as well) will be hit less by inflation than the recession (possibility of unemployment and total loss of income). So reducing inflation at the expense of employment and growth is essentially curtailing the production of the economy as a whole so that the incumbent property owners could keep their power structure. It's actually very anti-competitive and anti-free market. (But nobody really wants a free market anyway.)

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#252
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reserve bank governor is deeply unpopular Only 30% of people have mortgages, why should the remaining 70% care, many can even put money in savings accounts again after 15 years of them being basically worthless. He never said interest rates wouldn't rise either, he basically said they don't forecast the conditions that warrant a rise won't happen until then. Here's a pro-tip if you took on too much debt under t…

It's not 30% of people, it 35% of HOUSEHOLDS were home owners of the dwelling there were in on census night, with there being a total of 9.8 million 'households' in the country. A massive % of Australians working age population have 1 or more mortgages. Census dwelling data does not give an accurate picture of the number of Australians with mortgages. For example on my census our household reported that we rent the d…

You are not disproving his claims, 35% of the households being homeowners means absolutely nothing without knowing how many live as rentees for example. Also am I an houseowner if I paid 90% of the mortgage? 'Massive numbers' can mean anything between 0.01% and 99.8% depending on where you live, who are your friends and coworkers etc.

All that being said, it sounds just like any other western country, or in fact any country in the world apart from very, very few. Welcome to 21st century, you have mostly FED to thank for this, everything else just snowballed in its bad decisions.

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#253
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't have neat measurements that differentiate between supply side and demand side inflation. Honestly the 70s inflation and the 20s inflation were both caused by the same thing, supply side price shocks in oil prices.

It’s not oil shocks because the timing doesnt work out. Like inflation this time started before the Ukraine War and run up in oil prices. Same in the 70’s, inflation had already doubled by 1970 but the oil shock didnt happen until 1973. You could argue it makes inflation worse , but it wasnt the cause.

That implies there is a single factor that “causes” inflation. That’s not true. There are always inflationary and deflationary impacts on prices.

Oil and boomers leaving the workforce and covid derailing shipping and monetary policy and 1000 other things can all be pushing up prices at the same time.

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#254
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably it effectively does if the extra cash raised isn't spent.

The general goal of all the windfall taxes I've seen proposed is precisely that the money used goes back to ordinary people so it can be spent instead of supposedly being wasted sitting around in the bank accounts of the super-rich. This does not, of course, actually help with the underlying problem that there is too much money chasing too few goods and services - it has the opposite effect by increasing the amount o…

Why would giving ordinary people disincentivize companies from expanding production? Quite the opposite, people now have extra money to spent, so they should get the loans going for investment expansion!

The last sentence is exactly why you need to tax the big owners and corporations and not the workers, because they control most of the additional money supply in the profit-driven inflation.

(That being said, and as was noted, of course government can also run a surplus with the windfall tax, and that takes the money out of circulation entirely. However, as I explain above, inflation can be more complex, it might be money oversupply in only parts of the network, not the whole network.)

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#256
Leftist think tanks says inflation is driven by profits not wages. Duh.

None of these articles look at margins but at prices (and profits) - I wish people would understand the basics of economics.

If prices in the stuff you buy (gas) goes up, your revenue goes up, your profits go up, but your margin (depending on variable costs) might be the same (you don't change anything in running your business).

Or prices go up because you increase prices because of demand (margin increases, profits go up).

Or you increase prices because everyone increases prices (margin goes up).

There are very different models for why prices (and profits go) up.

We should talk about what happens, not "prices are going up", this is like saying "the sun goes up every morning", yes, some kind of understanding, but a very limited on why the sun "goes up" every morning.

I'd wish journalists would not dumb down readers.

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#257
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most of it goes to the lie that is the premise that interest rates are really the optimal way to control inflation There are only 3 ways to decrease inflation: - Interest rates - Price controls. This tends to have a lot of harmful side effects, such as the necessity of rationing and discentivizing the production of whatever you're price controlling. You only really do this for a few goods, so this doesn't help overa…

> Price controls. This tends to have a lot of harmful side effects, such as the necessity of rationing and discentivizing the production of whatever you're price controlling. You only really do this for a few goods, so this doesn't help overall inflation much, if at all. The necessity of rationing assumes that demand is outstripping supply. That's not the case when corporations are price gouging. Egg farms are not se…

Nixon price controls did not work, they led to stagflation and a bunch of other issues. In fact it is hard to find any example of price controls working, and a lot of evidence of the opposite.

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $50 minimum wage wouldn't affect unemployment? Why not make it $100?

If it works at $100, why not? As long as you're clear about what tradeoffs you're making, and as a society we still want no employment effect, if it works at $100, what's the problem? You only have something to discuss if it's clear that unemployment will rise, and even so you need to decide how much is tolerable in exchange for whatever you get out of raising the minimum wage.

Do you have even the slightest doubt that unemployment would rise significantly if the minimum wage were suddenly raised to $100/hr? I am certain that it would.

Re: Analysis finds Australia’s inflation being driven by company profits, not wages

#260
Inflation is not caused by profits or wages. Read Friedman. No one has yet made a convincing argument that he was wrong. Inflation is a monetary phenomena, not a function of normal supply & demand. In other words, it's precipitated by governments monetary practices. Look at the US, who spent 15+ years with very easy money. Now they are inflating like crazy. Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory are either ideological or simply liars. Debt matters, government spending matters, money supply growth matters. Lying about the actual inflation rate matters (the US again). As for the minimum wage, look at what happened with San Francisco & Seattle boosted their minimum wage. The current economic situation is nothing new. It's as simple as a grad school case study in macroeconomics
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