“Congress has stalled out on doing work that it could do to help families lower costs," Sen. Warren tells TIME. "The President has the tools to fight back.”
What if isn’t inflation but they’re hiding behind that narrative as a reason to keep raising prices. Not saying that’s 100% what happens but we got a whole lot of companies out there claiming there’s nothing they can do about the price hikes while also reporting record profits (after adjusting for inflation). The maths ain’t mathing.
Left to their own devices, companies want to raise prices and always have. You need a way to explain why they didn’t hike prices in the 2010s, when they were presumably just as greedy as they are now.
Put another way, inflation is about the loss of value of money itself, not individual prices going up. That’s a matter of macroeconomics: government spending, money supply, trade, etc.
Because people tend to notice when one price goes up. They notice much less when there are multiple excuses and many prices are going up. It’s a lot easier to refuse to buy one thing than it is to refuse to buy everything.
We don’t have the kind of supply/demand price curve you read about in econ 101 because there are too many barriers to entry to starting any business. Once you’re established, you can either choose to race to the bottom so that both you and your competitors lose money OR you can implicitly agree to set your prices about the same as theirs. So choose, do you like more money or less money?
Yes, it’s partly inflation. And it’s partly the PPP. But largely it’s just greed hidden behind excuses with no real threat of PR fallout.
So your story is that when all other prices happen to go up, lots of greedy companies conspire to up their prices. But why do the initial prices start going up to kick this off? Cosmic coincidence? Or is it conspiracy embedded in conspiracy?
In macroeconomics, the motivations of individual firms don’t matter, or at least we just assume all firm behave as self-interestedly as they can get away with. This was as true in the 2010s, when inflation was low, as today when inflation is high. What matters are things like fiscal policy, monetary policy, inflation expectations, etc. Not how greedy companies are – we can assume they always are greedy.
What if isn’t inflation but they’re hiding behind that narrative as a reason to keep raising prices. Not saying that’s 100% what happens but we got a whole lot of companies out there claiming there’s nothing they can do about the price hikes while also reporting record profits (after adjusting for inflation). The maths ain’t mathing.
Left to their own devices, companies want to raise prices and always have. You need a way to explain why they didn’t hike prices in the 2010s, when they were presumably just as greedy as they are now.
Put another way, inflation is about the loss of value of money itself, not individual prices going up. That’s a matter of macroeconomics: government spending, money supply, trade, etc.
Because people tend to notice when one price goes up. They notice much less when there are multiple excuses and many prices are going up. It’s a lot easier to refuse to buy one thing than it is to refuse to buy everything.
We don’t have the kind of supply/demand price curve you read about in econ 101 because there are too many barriers to entry to starting any business. Once you’re established, you can either choose to race to the bottom so that both you and your competitors lose money OR you can implicitly agree to set your prices about the same as theirs. So choose, do you like more money or less money?
Yes, it’s partly inflation. And it’s partly the PPP. But largely it’s just greed hidden behind excuses with no real threat of PR fallout.
So your story is that when all other prices happen to go up, lots of greedy companies conspire to up their prices. But why do the initial prices start going up to kick this off? Cosmic coincidence? Or is it conspiracy embedded in conspiracy?
In macroeconomics, the motivations of individual firms don’t matter, or at least we just assume all firm behave as self-interestedly as they can get away with. This was as true in the 2010s, when inflation was low, as today when inflation is high. What matters are things like fiscal policy, monetary policy, inflation expectations, etc. Not how greedy companies are – we can assume they always are greedy.
You’re apparently spamming similar replies without reading what you’re replying to.