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UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

grocerygazette.co.uk

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Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking like inflation is some conspiracy wielded by “the rich” (who are they? Are they all friends with each other and plan all their schemes together?) against the “others”. Fact is the inflation we are seeing here is caused by the after effects of Covid, the Energy price surges caused by the Ukraine war and in the special case of UK - Brexit, which has lead to huge import shortages due to increased bureauc…

https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter... You do not get it. This inflation is due to insiders (central bankers) printing money. Covid & ukraine are convenient excuses. Look up where this money ended up.

Could you explain briefly what I'm looking at? I'm interested but honestly don't know where to start

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#732

For reference, that's a fairly average value for Europe at the moment. Not sure why the UK is being singled out. https://i.redd.it/8hbhiqhowjpa1.png

Its not average for Europe. Aside from Germany, rest of Europe is at around ~10%. The UK is being singled out because its not able to import the groceries it used to do before Brexit now - there has been a low yield crop season in most parts of Europe and the domestic demand for groceries has literally exhausted the supply that can be exported. Since the UK is out of the Eu, its not possible to access the Eu domestic…

None of that is true. The EU average is 19.5%, it's the first figure in the link I posted.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you just confirming what they said?

Not really, people could eat cheaper food. Not to mention that most people eat too many calories.

This is an interesting point. It's definitely easy to switch to cheaper calories. Candy bars have high calorie counts and are cheap. Even today in the UK, you could buy 2000 kcal worth of candy bars for about £1.60.

And the inflation will push some people toward such food choices. Maybe not that extreme, but switching to cheaper food generally means eating less nutritious food (unless you were over-spending), which is awful.

Being pushed into single-digits spending on food daily isn't outside the realm of reality. £10 a day is about £305 a month. This is a lot of money for some vulnerable groups, like large single parent families, retirees, students, some young adults, and similar.

The inflation also harms people's diets in a several ways: you must buy less food or less nutritious food for the same amount of money, and you have less money for food as other expenses have inflated. What is worse, less healthy food demand has long-term consequences to do with its supply going down and prices going up further.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#734
post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

>A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or not, a weapon wielded by the rich against the middle and lower classes.

I’m sure the Roman plebeians also thought as much during drought induced famine; “the wealthy caused shortages by their greed”

Seems to be the natural response of the hyper-social-aware-confabulatory-ape-mind we, as humans possess.

But make no mistake, inflation is caused by a mismatch between societies expectation of productive capacity, and its real productive capacity.

Right now, real asset values are going down. Yes, some businesses have maintained nominal increases, but as consumers feel the squeeze so will asset real values. Asset valuation is based on real returns, and consumer behavior drives real returns.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#735
post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

The lower class does suffer the most, but unfortunately it is the policies intended to help them which actually cause most of the problem. By giving money to people without producing more stuff - or even making it harder to produce the same - you MUST have inflation, rationing, or empty shelves - and often all three. The solution to allowing lower classes to have more stuff is to make it easier for everybody to produ…

> The solution to allowing lower classes to have more stuff is to make it easier for everybody to produce more stuff.

So tax wealth rather than income?

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By giving money to people without producing more stuff - or even making it harder to produce the same - you MUST have inflation, rationing, or empty shelves - and often all three. Completely inaccurate. Giving people money that came from taxes does not increase the money supply. Giving people money that came from selling bonds does not increase the money supply. Only printing money increases the money supply.

The main driver in inflation is monetary velocity - the rate at which money is exchanging hands in the market. Increases in monetary supply almost invariably lead to increases in monetary velocity, so the two are generally equated - but this is not strictly necessary. If I gave you a quadrillion dollars tomorrow, and you chose to simply keep it under your [rather large] bed, but otherwise continued living as you do -…

So tax $1.10 for every $1 redistributed. It's a choice to frame inflation as coming from redistribution vs the wealthy avoiding taxes.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix is to produce more stuff. It's that simple. It might not be easy though. It would require us to focus on production, remove barriers, streamline regulations, encourage and actively celebrate production. It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. So we have less stuff. Combine this with giving people more money and you get inflation.

> It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. I cannot emphasize this enough. Wealthy Western nations have been wealthy for so long that people know how to cut up the pie in different sizes more so than they know how to bake more.

The negative moralizing of other people existing is genuinely out of control in California. From housing, to transportation, to climate change, to conservation, the major cities just causally like to pretend that if we can may other people go away, it'll solve our problems. It's thrown around causally like it's the state of nature, or an actual workable solution to anything.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lower class does suffer the most, but unfortunately it is the policies intended to help them which actually cause most of the problem. By giving money to people without producing more stuff - or even making it harder to produce the same - you MUST have inflation, rationing, or empty shelves - and often all three. The solution to allowing lower classes to have more stuff is to make it easier for everybody to produ…

We avoid inflation by taxing the wealthy and redistributing that to the lower socioeconomic classes. Global ecosystems are already in a free fall, we don’t need to “encourage production” [by deregulating industries? perhaps getting rid of those pesky environmental and worker protections? (that’ll definitely help out those workers) ] and even more rapid resource consumption.

You avoid inflation by taxing everybody. That takes money out of the system. The "wealthy" are already taxed pretty heavily, and they don't buy a lot of stuff. In fact, your best bang-for-the-buck on reducing inflation is to tax the lower classes, since their money tends to be higher-velocity than the money of the wealthy. It sounds fucked up, but mathematically speaking, you need to tax the poor if you want to stop inflation.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to point out that pretty much every natural economic condition is beneficial for the rich. The thing about money is it’s very flexible. You can hoard it in deflationary cycles, spend it on assets in inflationary cycles, grow it in economically good times and buy cheap property and goods in economically bad times.

It's like Monopoly, at some point there is just nothing you can do. The resets are probably the collapses of civilizations.

Money isn’t fundamentally a zero sum game like it seems on the surface… rich peoples wealth is invested, and gets used by less wealthy people to also create value - they might say draw a salary supported by a business loan, or mortgage a house.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#740
post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

I don’t think that’s quite right. Lower classes also have debt, and inflation effectively reduces your debt. In that case, it’s a direct transfer of wealth from lenders to debtors.
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