What's driving rising business costs?
libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org
What's driving rising business costs?
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#2Our economy is an oroborous of middlemen all using tariffs and inflation as excuses to raise their prices
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#3That's us actually. It's pretty much all busy work at this point.
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#4Insurance
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#5State sponsored monopolies is my vote. It's a failure of government to have fewer than ten players (non-Trusting) in any industry.
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#6[flagged]
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#7Insurance
It's worth noting that at least a lot of the (non-health) insurance rises are driven by the reinsurance market responding to ever higher dollar amounts of claims annually due to disasters.
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#8Our economy is an oroborous of middlemen all using tariffs and inflation as excuses to raise their prices
The ammount of shrinkflation in the last year is just stunning. Sometimes they bother to make the bottle/box/can incrementally imperceptibly smaller. Sometimes they just put less in. I track macros so I'm always looking at weights, and they're generically down 20%, while prices are up.
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#9We really need to switch to a National Health Service style of administration of health costs. Right now we have Medicare which makes unilateral cost determinations, and doctors and hospitals end up accepting below-cost reimbursement that because how could they turn away all the retired people, but they end up subsidizing these unilateral decisions with money from private insurance payors (namely everybody who's working).
Medicare might not technically be a monopsony, but it acts like one, and all the rest of us working folks end up paying the gap that rounds out the rest of the costs.
We have a few generations that have had easy lives, where they had easy access to homes, to higher education, to wealth building, and decided to cut off access to the same as soon as they got it, while still living off the labor of current working people that are not even allowed to build new apartments next to these wealthy people while they pay for all their health care.
The economy is a massive multiple player rpg with a point system economy that's fixed by federal and state laws, and it's been rigged both at the health care level and at every level to extract wealth for those that had it easy in the past.
Re: What's driving rising business costs?
#10Insurance
It's worth noting that at least a lot of the (non-health) insurance rises are driven by the reinsurance market responding to ever higher dollar amounts of claims annually due to disasters.
This underestimates the SUI premium hikes following the COVID layoffs. Most states charge businesses a risk premium when employees are terminated, and given that most states UI and Workers Compensation funds are now insolvent [0] they fight tooth and nail to increase premiums.
[0] - https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/docs/trustFundSolvReport2025...