471–480 of 1001 posts
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Hope you don't mind me re-posting this from another comment of mine, but since you specifically raise the UK it's actually more relevant here. In the UK it doesn't look like gouging is the issue: https://www.grocerygazette.co.uk/2023/01/31/food-companies-p... Honestly you're right that inflation can benefit the well off, but I don't buy the conspiracy theory angle. "The Establishment" has been holding inflation rates…
>It's (inflation) been the number 1 priority for central banks since the early 90s. I might believe this if M2 hadn't increased 4x since 2000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
However inflation!= growth in the money supply. A lot of the reasoning behind that growth was because inflation was persistently below the 2% target for the entire period up until 2021. That’s two decades of stubbornly low inflation, despite the feds best efforts in juicing the money supply.
It’s maddening how common it is for this forum to treat the issue as so simplistic and formulaic as though policymakers are somehow dunces compared to software engineers.
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> "property prices are down, etc" Well, idk about your area, but property prices in northern Germany are still well above the 2020 mark.
Top level comment was about the UK, and over here property prices are down. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/05/house-... .
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…
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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…
In the UK it is very hard not to look at it this way. Unlike the US and other countries, Covid stimulus was very much aimed at maintaining the status quo: there were no flat amount universal basic income style checks handed out to everyone as in the US - instead you got put on 80% furlough and had a large part of your salary paid for by the government. This basically meant the rich got ever richer whilst doing no wor…
It was the same in most EU countries, but wouldn't that result in lower inflation? The rich that kept getting richer would invest in stocks, business, real estate, park it offshore, buy another helicopter or yacht, etc. which wouldn't impact demand for most products whose prices are increasing.
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And that is OK, as long as you recognize your position of extreme privilege there.
I don’t think it’s “extreme privilege” to not notice a price increase of maybe $3? I could see it if you’re living in extreme poverty but anyone middle class and above shouldn’t waste mental energy on things like that
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>It's (inflation) been the number 1 priority for central banks since the early 90s. I might believe this if M2 hadn't increased 4x since 2000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
What has that have to do with inflation in the UK?
The rocket isn't necessarily intrinsically useful for everyone but is important because it is the thing that pulls forward all the demand for the all the commodities and all the intermediate production.
Without the rocket there would be no factories, no jobs, no meaning. The factory MUST run to keep everyone's livelihoods going even though the rocket isn't relevant day to day. It also incentivizes things like innovation, efficiency, etc...
However, building TWO rockets at the same time puts such a resource demand that there start to be shortages and breakdowns. Parts of the factory start shutting down. People are left jobless. One of the most serious is if the factory breakdown cascades to the power system (e.g. money) which causes the entire factory to breakdown.
It's a tough job to figure out how to restart the factory incrementally. Meanwhile everyone is left jobless while this is being debugged.
So there's a balance between how many rockets have to be simultaneously built. If there's too little demand, the factories are idle. Capital rots and there are less jobs. If there's too much demand, then shortages and price spikes will cause an even more serious breakdown.
What gold/bitcoin/austrian philosophers understand is that the price of money HAS to reflect market reality. E.g. in a Factorio game all bottlenecks are important to production but if you mess up the energy bottleneck, then the whole thing breaks down. Having a hack like "manually move a few tons a coal every hour" and forgetting it once is catastrophic. The market conditions have been manipulated with buffer.
The Fed & other central banks are usually concerned primarily with the layers of production that affect the most people. E.g. food and gas are critical. However when the "power supply" is threatened they need to start doing things like bailing out banks even if it seems insane to be focusing on this when people can't afford food.
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> Demand for food is inelastic I doubt it. I've read that Americans throw away 40% of their food. Obesity rates suggest people eat far more than they need to. And there are major choices in what to eat - cheap vs expensive calories.
Obesity reates in the US, from my observation, are a compound effect of the unavailability of affordable, healthy ingredients (fruits, vegetables) and cultural factors (a custom of never cooking healthy meals, for instance rice and vegetables, instead of consuming carb-heavy burgers and sugary milk shakes and coke at fast food outlets). Friends in the US drove school buses during the day and worked at Wendy's at nigh…
I hear that a lot, and it simply isn't true. A bag of apples is cheap, so is a bag of beans, a bag of rice, a bag of potatoes, etc.
Some of the cheapest foods in the supermarket are an ordinary can of beans. Milk is cheap, too.