Americans Continue to Name Inflation as Top Financial Problem
Americans Continue to Name Inflation as Top Financial Problem
Americans say inflation is the most important financial problem for their family as they continue to give subdued ratings of their personal finances.
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Fucking euphemisms for 'corporate greed'.
It's societal greed.
All of the people criticizing those maximizing profit would do the same in their position.
You have a point in that corporations align closely with human greed. However, corporations are anti-social and amoral unlike human beings. We need them to serve humanity and not the other way round. They're currently taking too much too quickly.
no, I would not apply for a job at McKinsey.
So for like a dozen years between 2008 to 2020 corporations weren't greedy?
Corporations finding a new way to be greedy does not mean they were not greedy in the past as well.
But asserting that the new inflation is a result of corporate greed does imply that the corporate greed is a new factor. It doesn’t make any sense
My dude, corporations were putting in their earnings reports for the COVID years that they were having record profits because they were using COVID-based supply disruptions to increase their prices. Even a basic knowledge of economics would lead one to understand that if supply for a good becomes limited, demand stays the same, and profits go up, it could only be because the price of that good has significantly increased as well.
Profits go up per unit, but not necessarily the total amount since you're moving fewer units
Except corporations were posting record profits. So both profit per unit and overall profitability were increased.
They took advantage of COVID to fleece the public.
If you've been paying attention you would have seen that profit margins were going up as well
For some companies, sure.
Intel and AMD, for example, already sold so many computers during the pandemic their profits are down now
No it implies there was a factor restraining that greed before and it's been removed.
No, just a new type.
How is it a new type? What's new?
Getting away with price gouging is new.
So the greed is constant, but the market let companies raise prices.
The market gave them an excuse to raise prices.
You don't have to take my word for it.
The average price of coca-cola during this period of time, adjusting for inflation, has been $1.89, and the most current price of $2.69 is 42.33% above that average.
https://moneynotmoney.com/historical-price-of-coca-cola-in-united-states/
The greed isn’t the new part. The new part is lack of competition after thousands of small businesses got forcibly shut down in 2020.
That's what I'm saying, pandemic, shutdowns, stimulus, etc. is the new thing
The Socratic method requires someone else who’s leaning in. When people are leaning out you just gotta come right out and say the thing.
during those years the corporate/investors focus was on market share growth, so they purposely went for low prices or free when possible. when the money spigot turned off things switched from growth to profit/dividend and consumers are stuck.
Yes, the low interest rates we had for years meant basically free money for all these companies in addition to the low car loan and mortgage rates that the rest of us benefitted from. Interest rates being low was a tool used to pull us out of the recession but nobody had the balls to raise them back when things turned around because you can't win elections by forcing people to take their medicine.
It's the opposite, inflation actually decreased after the rate hikes.
which rate hikes/time period are you talking about?
We had the most inflation in 2022, then the Fed increased rates and the inflation went lower as the rates went higher
You can't just throw an image up. You have to source it or we're going to assume you made it in MSPaint. But you're already showing signs of not understanding what inflation is. It is not some stand alone year by year metric. It's a velocity measurement. Like your car's speedometer. You drove X number of miles in Y time. Instead here it's you rose X points in 1 year. The previous points do not go away. The wage increases from year 4 do not magically erase inflation from years 1-3, unless they beat year 4 inflation by the the sum of inflation from years 1-3.
Source:
https://twitter.com/ah_shapiro/status/1777696160691704213
You're the one who doesn't know that inflation is curbed by interest rates, since you proposed interest rates increase inflation
In fact, higher interest rates decrease inflation
Where in my comment do I even mention interest rates? At any rate, you're not wrong that they're supposed to curb inflation but they haven't. You're own source says-
Leila Bengali decomposes inflation into interest-rate responsive and unresponsive categories. (whether each inflation category has historically declined >after a surprise interest rate hike)
Current excess inflation is entirely due to the unresponsive categories.
That's that flat red section. It's unresponsive to the rate change. You can see the blue section responded even before the FED actually made the change. That's when the FED made statements about raising the rate. So we can see that the responsive section was very responsive. But the unresponsive section is keeping rates from properly coming down.
When the Fed makes statements, banks already respond because it affects the curve. If you expect higher rates in the future, you wouldn't accept longer duration bonds right now for the current smaller rate.
So a statement that rates will be increased actually moves them for anything other than the current over night rates
Greed is just one part of the equation of higher prices. You also need opportunity. If prices ramped up so rapidly without a plausible excuse, then it would lead to an investigation. Hell, the egg producers took their excuse of bird flu too far and jacked up prices about 6x, which was so ridiculous that it did lead to the threat of an investigation and that alone magically got the price down to "only" about 2x.
Which part of the equation is it?
Like how much greed gives you 1% higher prices? How do you measure greed?
It doesn't map so simply. Greed will try to push prices up as high as possible, but what's possible depends on other factors. People can understand how a global pandemic causing supply issues would lead to higher prices, but greed took full advantage of that understanding and pushed it far beyond limits.
It didn't push beyond limits, greed pushes the price exactly up to the limit people will pay.
That's like claiming that no one gets scammed because they were willing to participate.
Usually a scammer doesn't uphold his end of the contract. They promised you something, but you didn't get it.
That's not the case here
There are many scams and a lot of them don't involve a contract at all. There are also ones that do involve a contract and upholding it is part of the scam. Regardless, you missed the point that just because someone pays the price, doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy.
There's an implied verbal contract when you say you're providing a service and you are in fact not.
My point is that a lot of people are fine with paying the price they are paying. The people who are not can just stop