“Not really looking for a debate about it tbh.”
No, just the last word. There’s a lot more to it that clearly explains why it’s a systematic failure that led to this, and it’s a lot more complex that just over supply of cash. You can’t stop looking at other facts once you’ve researched just enough to find an answer you’re comfortable with.
Your previous comment was basically a massive industry wide conspiracy theory though, so their response of a more sensible answer to give you something a bit more concrete to go on was pretty reasonable to me.
Not a conspiracy theory but the inevitable conclusion of a system left unchecked by regulation for too long. We have slowly rolled ourselves to the edge for decades yet have been able to maintain a very precarious balance, until a worldwide pandemic kicked the cart and set it rolling down the hill.
Did the entire planet have too much cash and an urge to spend it all at once? Yes. That only explains the flashpoint where prices exploded. Demand was at an unprecedented high from the world coming out of lock down at the same time that supply was at an all time low thanks to the pandemic. (There’s a lot more to all of this of course, but there are going to be countless PhD thesis written about this macroeconomic clusterfuck and this isn’t one of them.) So far, this all makes sense. Where things go sideways is when supply stabilizes, cost of goods sold start to go down, and yet prices continue to rise. Remember how the fed thought that information was going to be a short, temporary spike that didn’t require intervention? This is why. They expected the system to autocorrect, but it didn’t. Prices continue to rise. People have less money. Prices continue to rise. Interest rates skyrocket in an attempt to cool the economy. Prices continue to rise. Consumer spending slows but prices rise.
Corporations are literally geared towards maximizing profits. It’s not a conspiracy if they are working as intended. The failure, IMHO, is in how we have chosen to manage our economy. Complete deregulation and a slew of other choices have brought us here. Not a conspiracy but also not as simple as “too much money” or “too much cheap credit”. So, amending my original comment, yes it is in part inflation but it isn’t just inflation.
PS: Credit card debt in the US surpassed $1T. We’re running on literal borrowed time and every business around us is trying to find new and creative ways to squeeze every penny we don’t have out of us, by design, without a check or a balance in sight.
It is specifically a conspiracy theory that there’s a price-fixing cartel across the entire economy. You can give rhetoric about unchecked capitalism and all this, but the fact still remains that we’re talking about hundreds to thousands of companies that would have to opt into this scheme (drawing the line fairly arbitrarily at “the ones that comprise most market share”).
I raised this point already - individual corporations are incentivized to break with a price-fixing scheme because it increases market share. Consumers don’t want to pay exorbitant prices if there’s any alternative. Didn’t hear a response.
