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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?

by tacker2000 4y ago

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 bureaucracy at the border, etc… So please stop this conspiracy talk about the “rich” creating inflation to disown the “poor”.

SubiculumCode 4y ago
i would add climate change to the mix as impacting agriculture
- pacija 4y ago
  I would also add bunch of people in IT working primarily on peddling ads and developing total surveillance tools for years instead of doing something that produces real value.
schrectacular 4y ago
Did they? I saw them say "wittingly or not".
elevenoh4 4y ago
https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/ZB6FSECCTJPR5CPUO6TM3BATYQ.png https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter... You do not get it. This inflation is due to insiders (central bankers) printing money. Covid & ukraine are convenient excuses. Look up where this money ended up.
- jldugger 4y ago
  > https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter... Help me understand: is this a stacked chart? Why does a chart that ends in 2021 show inflation in 2022 and 2023? > This inflation is due to insiders (central bankers) printing money. If this is about the money supply, why is food more affected than other products? IMO everything is a factor, and there is no one culprit, and therefore no one easy fix.
  - elevenoh4 4y ago
    Imagine being a rational human looking at g7 central banks adding 40% to the money supply in <2 years, and your focus is "everything is a factor, there no one culprit" for price inflation. https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106649548-1596642770437-20200805_m2_money_supply_percent_change_year_earlier.png?v=1596642776 https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106649548-159664277043... I look forward to open source ai economic simulation tools - when you change variables like m2, you'll see what happens to inflation - and there'll be no more ambiguity For now: ask gpt-4 yourself & get a lesson
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > Imagine being a rational human looking at g7 central banks adding 40% to the money supply in <2 years, and your focus is "everything is a factor, there no one culprit" for price inflation. Imagine being a rational human and deciding that a war involving two of the biggest agricultural exporters in Europe, one of whom is also one of the main exporters of oil and gas, as well as a ton of different important materials (nickel, steel, fertilizers, etc.), after 2 years of pandemic that crippled global supply lines and resulted in explosion of prices in many raw materials, have combined absolutely no impact on prices anywhere.
    - jldugger 4y ago
      just sayin': why did inflation appear when it did? why not sooner? why not later? Why is the impact of inflation non-uniform? We know the model pretty well: "money printer goes brrr" leads to higher prices for good and services. But the data lately doesn't make a great supporting case. > I look forward to open source ai economic simulation tools - when you change variables like m2, you'll see what happens to inflation - and there'll be no more ambiguity Economists have been leading the way in multifactor causal inference, but GPT in particular is not well suited to it. And macroeconomics in particular is hard to measure via natural experiment, so you're left trying to estimate counterfactuals based on a paucity of data but look, my day job is people coming to me with timeseries data showing an engineering fuckup and debating about what caused it (usually ops vs prod). if theres a nuanced take, im all ears, but so far your fire has brought more heat than light.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Unless people who can afford it are hoarding groceries an increasing monetary base shouldn't be affecting grocery prices. Only a decrease in supply versus demand, or increase costs of production, should be increasing grocery prices, if market manipulations aren't happening.
  - elevenoh4 4y ago
    >Unless people who can afford it are hoarding groceries an increasing monetary base shouldn't be affecting grocery prices you don't get it money is worth less when there's more of it. especially 40% more of it. all the inputs to your groceries (labour, energy, materials, transport etc.) thus nominally cost more when inputs cost more, your groceries cost more
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      I actually do get it. An excess of money doesn't automatically make things cost more. An excess of demand with (more purchases), or for (higher prices), that money does. The demand excess has to start somewhere.
      - elevenoh4 4y ago
        >The demand excess has to start somewhere. What do you think putting more money into circulation does to demand & nominal purchasing power? An excess of money causes increased demand per unit dollar and subsequently, higher prices and inflation, through mechanisms including the Cantillon effect, changes in monetary velocity etc. If i deposit more $ in your bank account, what happens to your nominal demand?
        anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > What do you think putting more money into circulation does to demand & nominal purchasing power? Ideally people would save for a rainy day. But people don't, and can't, always do this. Because for some this is the rainy day. Non-ideally I would assume that most demand increases would go for non-groceries, and non-commodities in general, such as housing and travel, though I would expect some increase in durable goods commodity prices as people replace older goods with newer. Yet here we have grocery price increases. Are salaries in the grocery production chain going up 18%? Warehouse costs? I doubt it. The price increases are mainly coming from elsewhere, not from money printing.
- wholinator2 4y ago
  Could you explain briefly what I'm looking at? I'm interested but honestly don't know where to start
baremetal 4y ago
> Are they all friends with each other and plan all their schemes together? They don't all have to actively conspire or even know one another for them to have a shared business interest.
aww_dang 4y ago
Do central bankers and other policy elites have no truck with financial elites? What does it mean when stimulus is injected into markets for the purpose of 'stabilizing' them? Are they not concerned with financial markets? This seems to be the directly stated objective of many economic policies. Is this a conspiracy theory or a simple observation of incentives?
bcrosby95 4y ago
It's not really an active conspiracy. It's just the rich pursuing their own interests. When the workers or poor pursue their interests too effectively, the rich in positions of power make them take their medicine. But when the rich do it too effectively, well, that's just the free market and you can't do anything about that.
- fifticon 4y ago
  i really don't like the way this medicine tastes.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
"rich" and "poor" are just holdovers from conquerer and conquered. Just because the mandate that one group acknowledge the other's right to create value by fiat (e.g. by stamping Caesar's face into a coin) is no longer delivered by guys with swords doesn't make it not a conspiracy by one group to keep another group in its place.
- colossal 4y ago
  well it still is delivered by guys with swords in a sense -- now they're just guys with guns and jumpsuits bearing the words "US ARMY."
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    More like, "IRS". Taxation is the demand for the currency. Even if you conduct all trade with other people in seashells (or whatever), you'd still need to obtain dollars to pay your taxes.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    They got smarter about it in the late 70's. The rich don't even have to send guys anymore, they just send guns to the local thugs with an agreement that those thugs will, upon seizing power, hook the local economy into the US banking system. The thugs get to keep the loans, but the debt gets transferred to the local community, which cements the "somebody who isn't you gets to create abstractions that you have to treat as money"-part of the deal. The words that used to go with it are "progressive free-market policies", but I think Kamala Harris recently called it "anti-corruption" or something along those lines.
copymoro 4y ago
what he says, is but the way in which he conveys the meaning the rich by this point aren't any group of people, but a section of the system. the system is structural, not-alive. he is choosing to regard the system like rungs on a ladder. each rung is a social class. the point I'm making is that he's describing the "ladder", referring to structural/systemic aspects of our civilization, not the "persons" standing on each rung which is the meaning you chose to focus on. our society really is arranged in tiers or classes regardless of you accept it or not (but again, this is a way to understand it; there may be others) in the UK the so-called "rich" (to answer your question) would be people with legal noble titles. in Smerica this class of people is not explicit. I guess the older European system (which inspired American ones) at least is explicit about the fact that the royals and their nobles are "the rich" class. I countries with continuing monarchies, like the UK, they really have a noble title and registration. they're "better than you" by legal definition because of choices their parents and older ancestors made (or were forced to make)
bryanlarsen 4y ago
There's a good case to be made that Putin was the richest man in the world. Nobody's sure what he's worth, but it's quite likely it was more than the $200B Arnault has. And Putin is singularly responsible for a good chunk of the inflation. So blaming it on the rich might be appropriate, but not in the way that it's usually meant.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  No sure why you are being down voted but the global recession and inflation is the result of Vladimir Putin's choices and virtually no one else.
ThunderSizzle 4y ago
[flagged]
- SkipperCat 4y ago
  The war in 100% the result of Putin. Putting the responsibility of this on Biden doesn't make sense. Besides, Russia was sending troops into eastern Ukraine since 2014, way before Biden took office.
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    You showed the evidence in your own post. The return to Biden brought the return of typical American foreign policy, which Trump upset. This foreign policy plan has basically been the same under Bush, Obama, and Biden. The last time Putin pushed the Ukraine issue was under Obama. Under Trump’s watch, Putin didn't dare touch Ukraine. If I was Putin, and I wanted to invade a country, I would sure as hell prefer Biden as the opponent than Trump. Trump might actually finish the war before it starts. Biden is still trying to remember he's president.
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      now the story changes: the war that putin started in 2014 is not the fault of Biden, but the fault of the foreign policy of everyone except the former guy? instead of the dude who actually started it with the invading? you also seem to misunderstand that Putin has been "touching Ukraine" since the war started in 2014, and the former guy did nothing to stop the war
      - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
        I'm not saying Putin isn't responsible. That's as obvious as crickets. If people didn't commit evil, the world would be perfect. Obviously, people commit evil. However, if you are charged with authority, it is your responsibility to defend against evil, while also pushing to being about peace. Obama and Biden did not keep evil in check. Trump did so much more, as ironic as that may seem to you.
yulker 4y ago
If a particular group has converging interests and is facing a similar set of incentives, they don't need to be in an explicit "conspiracy" to be aligned. The emergent behavior in a system can both advantage a particular group at the expense of another without there needing to be a conspiracy whatsoever.
Closi 4y ago
I don't think it's a conspiracy theory - lots of companies are posting record profits right now as their prices have risen above the cost price inflation, so profiteering is a valid fourth class of price inflation.
gampleman 4y ago
I find it fairly unlikely that the rich in the UK don't actually know each other. The UK probably has the most developed class divide of most western countries, so in-class socialisation is a pretty big deal around here.
- fifticon 4y ago
  they very much do, and they go to the same schools. They even have a parliamentary chamber with socalled nobles.
trwhite 4y ago
I think it's in Hackers & Painters that Paul Graham talks about the commonly held view that wealth is like a pie, that one group of people having more somehow means others must have less. He's also immensely wealthy, so I take what he says with a pinch of salt
Tryk 4y ago
Consider the comparison between Norway and Sweden, two extremely similar countries in almost all respects. Food inflation in Sweden is 22.1% over 12-month [0] Food inflation in Norway is 8.8% over 12-months [1] Obviously someone is making money hand-over-fist from this 12.7% discrepancy. Comments like the one above are really disruptive to any constructive conversations. It is not a conspiracy. The comment above is (at best) astonishingly naïve. While it is a emotionally plausible argument, we can see it does not hold up if we compare the rates of inflation over similar countries. [0]: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/prices-and-consumption/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-cpi/pong/statistical-news/consumer-price-index-cpi-february-2023/ https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... [1]: https://www.ssb.no/en/priser-og-prisindekser/konsumpriser/statistikk/konsumprisindeksen https://www.ssb.no/en/priser-og-prisindekser/konsumpriser/st...
- nradov 4y ago
  Norway and Sweden are hardly similar in this respect. Norway is a net food exporter. Sweden is a net food importer. That alone can account for much of the discrepancy.
  - Tryk 4y ago
    I don't quite understand what you mean- Could you ground you statement with some source?
    - nradov 4y ago
      It's pretty simple. Subtract the value of food imports from the value of food exports. If the value is positive then the country is a net exporter, and if it's negative then they're a net importer. Every major country imports some foodstuffs and exports others, but countries with a trade surplus are generally better positioned to handle food price inflation. https://www.nibio.no/en/news/ten-facts-about-the-norwegian-food-industry https://www.nibio.no/en/news/ten-facts-about-the-norwegian-f...
      - 4y ago
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
It is called "Greedflation". To say it is a conspiracy is true, in that corporations are conspiring against consumers to make more profit. Some articles: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/24/greedflation-are-large-firms-using-crises-as-cover-to-push-up-their-profits https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/24/greedflatio... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/greedflation-food-brands-may-be-profiteering-from-price-hikes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/greedflation-food-brands-may... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/12/global-greedflation-big-firms-drive-shopping-bills-to-record-highs https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/12/global-gree... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/02/ecb-looking-out-for-price-gouging-greedflation-price-rises-eurozone-inflation-profit-margins https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/02/ecb-looking...
- prottog 4y ago
  Corporations were never greedy until the last few years, I take it?
- argentinian 4y ago
  It's incredible, a lot of people in developed countries are thinking like argentinians now. In Argentina, the propagandist media companies that belong to politicians do everything in their hands to blame anyone for inflation, except for money printing policies dictated by politicians. And we have over 100% anual inflation.
selfmodruntime 4y ago
This is. Tired talking point and basically entirely lies. Necessity prices have risen by large margins in the name of inflation, but they have also recorded insane profits at historic levels.
wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
"They" are the wealthy people, property owners and such, in society who make a scene if their wealth gets taxed any higher. Every western society heavily taxes working, where often for me as a freelancer it hardly pays of to work more then 6-8 months per year. But taxes on wealth are very low. And owning property often has many tax cuts, and tends to benefit from low interest rates. The effect of it is is that either you play the wealth game through property or investing or you are lost out. I think it would be fare to protect the assets people accumulate through hard work, but at the same time it should be more balanced then it is now and we shouldnt all have to be financial experts.
- fifticon 4y ago
  it is known since the french revolution and marx, little has changed in that regard.
rcarr 4y ago
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 work and the poor tried to scrape by. In addition, covid contract schemes were widely abused by business owners, the most high profile case being that of Conservative peer Michele Mone who made off with £200 million. It is estimated that billions of pounds of public money has been irretrievably lost through what is essentially government neglect and corruption. On top of this, you've got Brexit which was orchestrated by the right wing conservative aristocracy class for their own benefit. And we've also had a conservative government that has not only not pursued a green agenda over the last 13 years, but bent over backwards to get Russian energy money. So yes, the factors leading to inflation were outside of control. But that doesn't change the fact that the powers that be in this country have been running the country in their own self interests and have given up on even pretending otherwise and that is why the UK is being hit harder by inflation than any other country in the western world. They were so high on their own supply they even elected Liz Truss to cut taxes in an inflationary environment and only reluctantly accepted that they weren't going to get away with it when the global market responded by saying it would tank the property market (which the whole stack of cards relies on). > Are they all friends with each other and plan all their schemes together?) against the “others”. This is the UK with it's notorious and very real class and aristocracy system. They don't call the royal family "the firm" for nothing.
- dukeyukey 4y ago
  > that is why the UK is being hit harder by inflation than any other country in the western world I don't think that's true. Right now, UK inflation is lower than almost any European country east of Germany, including Sweden, and it seems inflation was running lower throughout COVID than even the US.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    Please send me links if you've got any because this is conflicting with what I have been reading so it would be nice to have a more balanced view if this is the case.
wwweston 4y ago
> 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?) No of course not. That'd be 90s-Mr-Burns territory. Nowadays you pay a SaaS offering to do it for you if you're a landlord: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r... So the question is -- is real estate the only market you'd do that in? Seems unlikely. "If I had to guess, I would bet that the big food conglomerates have all signed up with some common AI-backed pricing software package, and that shares data between them. Or, at the very least, they've all started using AI algorithms to increase or decrease production of any number of goods to maximize their profits based on real-time sales and economic data. And since they're all probably contracting this out to the same or a handful of similar AI firms, the conclusions they reach are similar. If all the production companies are running algorithms that tell them to jack up their prices at the same time, well they all jack up their prices at the same time. They don't actually have to meet in some smoke-filled backroom to plot a price-increase conspiracy. They just all run similar algorithms that respond the same way to market trends. The consumer market is highly consolidated, with most goods having just 1-3 producers. If those few producers all sign up for the same AI price-setting software, there won't be price competition to punish needless price increases." https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/11gwm2y/european_central_bank_confronts_a_cold_reality/jarv9rg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/11gwm2y/europea...
JaimeThompson 4y ago
The rich are those who can get high level politicians on the phone quickly to discuss their issues while the non-rich are those who can't do that.
bakugo 4y ago
This comment is bizarre. Corporations taking advantage of the current economic climate to make a profit is a conspiracy now? Most of the large corporations responsible for selling these supposedly "inflated" goods are posting record profits with no shame, and here you are covering your eyes and ears to defend them.
- G3rn0ti 4y ago
  Inflation means price increases across all actors in an economy. Large corporations also have to pay higher production costs now. So all these „profits“ are eaten up by the price increases those corporations see, too. I don’t think you have a valid understanding of what a „profit“ really is…
  - bakugo 4y ago
    > So all these „profits“ are eaten up by the price increases those corporations see, too. I don’t think you have a valid understanding of what a „profit“ really is… Uh, you should google what the word "profit" means. You're thinking of "revenue".
    - G3rn0ti 4y ago
      Er, nope. You are mixing it up, I am sorry. Profit = revenue minus all expenses. So if prices are rising, revenue grows but profit stays the same as expenses are driven up too by inflated prices of the factors of production. But it’s a typical observation I have whenever discussing economics with Europeans — economic illiteracy is rampant, here, unfortunately, because schools do not give much priority to basic economic facts.
      - unity1001 4y ago
        > I have whenever discussing economics with Europeans — economic illiteracy is rampant The economic illiteracy would be not being aware that all those megacorps are posting record profits and trying to gloss it over with made-up theories of your own and accusing an entire continent of people with economic illiteracy in the process: https://theconversation.com/food-giants-reap-enormous-profits-during-times-of-crisis-184223 https://theconversation.com/food-giants-reap-enormous-profit... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-profits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-prof... If their costs were rising more than their revenue, they wouldnt post record profits. They are posting record profits. You are simply wrong. You just !made up! a theory to avoid the actual reality. Why have you made such a blunt, exaggerated, false statement like 'European economic illiteracy' without doing so much as a google search. Do you know how that made you look...
havblue 4y ago
The "who are the elites?" question is one that many people struggle with when looking for who to point a finger at for modern economic woes. A lot us who post on this site are in technical fields and are well-compensated. So it wouldn't shock me if many people in the world consider "us" to be part of "them". In this case though, we're simply talking about inflation. One cause of inflation that you've neglected to mention is quantitative easing and how it's been used to artificially lower interest rates while allowing for higher deficits. I'd suggest you start there before you strawman people who disagree with you as "conspiracy theorists"...
t0bia_s 4y ago
It doesnt matter what you think. Poor people that loose money without possibility to do anything about it = angry people. That is a big problem. We know from history the consequence of terrible inflation in 30's in Germany.
hnburnsy 4y ago
Why does Brexit have to equal "increased bureaucracy at the border"? Is it due to the lifelong bureaucrats that loves enforcing it? An effective government should do everything in its power to reduce the bureaucracy in extraordinary times.
- goneri 4y ago
  They've decided to leave the European Common Market, which was precisely designed to avoid the bureaucracy and reduce the burden of the customs procedures.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  All countries have customs checks, to check that incoming goods conform with regulations, applicable tariffs are paid, etc. Except countries in the EU, which has a common market that made such checks unnecessary inside of it. Of course there are still customs on the outside EU border. So if you leave that, and your borders are now not internal market borders anymore but your and the EU's external borders, you're going to do more customs checks than you used to have. In both directions.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  There's two sides to every trading relationship. Even if the UK tries to reduce bureaucracy on their side, there's still all the bureaucracy on the side of the other countries they're trading with. And they literally just torpedoed all their trade relationships by leaving a large customs union that allowed them to trade with a large number of important partners with significantly reduced bureaucracy. I agree with you that bureaucracy here is the problem, and Brexit was the cause of it.
- gilessbrown 4y ago
  The Brexit slogan was "Taking back control of our borders". Please explain how can you do that without increasing "bureaucracy"?
isaacremuant 4y ago
The corporations lobby the gov and both enrich each other. It's not a conspiracy but a well known aspect of the modern world. It breaks democracy benefitting a few in power. The effects of covid are actually the effects of covid policies which benefited govs and big tech and other corporation's while screwing most people. Yes, it appears that people wanted it but when you consider the censorship, behaviour modification propaganda and unconstitutional state force application to suppress people who wanted to oppose them, it's not that clear of a picture. Then Ukraine, also something that benefits the gov, the energy/war companies and corporations, and not the people. Also heavily propagandized to push more profiteering through endless war. No conspiracy. Just the system at work and people like you dismissing the true criticism with the same old labels. You may feel an impulse to call me fascist, racist and other customary labels soon, heh.
ocbyc 4y ago
I had to scroll down to far. Cheap nuclear energy now!
boredhedgehog 4y ago
> Energy price surges caused by the Ukraine war Do you mean the sanctions our rulers voluntarily chose to impose on that sector? Or is there something intrinsic to the war that would have that effect?
drewcoo 4y ago
> stop this conspiracy talk about the “rich” creating inflation to disown the “poor” You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. - George Carlin
briantakita 4y ago
"Oops...did I do that?" is a comedic phrase uttered by someone who makes a mistake which harms others but benefits them. Call it whatever you want, i.e. "Conspiracy theory", but you cannot deny who is harmed & who benefits.
fear_and_coffee 4y ago
[dead]
hgomersall 4y ago
Someone is always profiting from inflated prices. I suspect it's not the poor.

SubiculumCode 4y ago

i would add climate change to the mix as impacting agriculture

pacija 4y ago
I would also add bunch of people in IT working primarily on peddling ads and developing total surveillance tools for years instead of doing something that produces real value.

schrectacular 4y ago

Did they? I saw them say "wittingly or not".

elevenoh4 4y ago

https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/ZB6FSECCTJPR5CPUO6TM3BATYQ.png https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter... You do not get it. This inflation is due to insiders (central bankers) printing money. Covid & ukraine are convenient excuses. Look up where this money ended up.

jldugger 4y ago
> https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter... Help me understand: is this a stacked chart? Why does a chart that ends in 2021 show inflation in 2022 and 2023? > This inflation is due to insiders (central bankers) printing money. If this is about the money supply, why is food more affected than other products? IMO everything is a factor, and there is no one culprit, and therefore no one easy fix.
- elevenoh4 4y ago
  Imagine being a rational human looking at g7 central banks adding 40% to the money supply in <2 years, and your focus is "everything is a factor, there no one culprit" for price inflation. https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106649548-1596642770437-20200805_m2_money_supply_percent_change_year_earlier.png?v=1596642776 https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106649548-159664277043... I look forward to open source ai economic simulation tools - when you change variables like m2, you'll see what happens to inflation - and there'll be no more ambiguity For now: ask gpt-4 yourself & get a lesson
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Imagine being a rational human looking at g7 central banks adding 40% to the money supply in <2 years, and your focus is "everything is a factor, there no one culprit" for price inflation. Imagine being a rational human and deciding that a war involving two of the biggest agricultural exporters in Europe, one of whom is also one of the main exporters of oil and gas, as well as a ton of different important materials (nickel, steel, fertilizers, etc.), after 2 years of pandemic that crippled global supply lines and resulted in explosion of prices in many raw materials, have combined absolutely no impact on prices anywhere.
  - jldugger 4y ago
    just sayin': why did inflation appear when it did? why not sooner? why not later? Why is the impact of inflation non-uniform? We know the model pretty well: "money printer goes brrr" leads to higher prices for good and services. But the data lately doesn't make a great supporting case. > I look forward to open source ai economic simulation tools - when you change variables like m2, you'll see what happens to inflation - and there'll be no more ambiguity Economists have been leading the way in multifactor causal inference, but GPT in particular is not well suited to it. And macroeconomics in particular is hard to measure via natural experiment, so you're left trying to estimate counterfactuals based on a paucity of data but look, my day job is people coming to me with timeseries data showing an engineering fuckup and debating about what caused it (usually ops vs prod). if theres a nuanced take, im all ears, but so far your fire has brought more heat than light.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
Unless people who can afford it are hoarding groceries an increasing monetary base shouldn't be affecting grocery prices. Only a decrease in supply versus demand, or increase costs of production, should be increasing grocery prices, if market manipulations aren't happening.
- elevenoh4 4y ago
  >Unless people who can afford it are hoarding groceries an increasing monetary base shouldn't be affecting grocery prices you don't get it money is worth less when there's more of it. especially 40% more of it. all the inputs to your groceries (labour, energy, materials, transport etc.) thus nominally cost more when inputs cost more, your groceries cost more
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    I actually do get it. An excess of money doesn't automatically make things cost more. An excess of demand with (more purchases), or for (higher prices), that money does. The demand excess has to start somewhere.
    - elevenoh4 4y ago
      >The demand excess has to start somewhere. What do you think putting more money into circulation does to demand & nominal purchasing power? An excess of money causes increased demand per unit dollar and subsequently, higher prices and inflation, through mechanisms including the Cantillon effect, changes in monetary velocity etc. If i deposit more $ in your bank account, what happens to your nominal demand?
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        > What do you think putting more money into circulation does to demand & nominal purchasing power? Ideally people would save for a rainy day. But people don't, and can't, always do this. Because for some this is the rainy day. Non-ideally I would assume that most demand increases would go for non-groceries, and non-commodities in general, such as housing and travel, though I would expect some increase in durable goods commodity prices as people replace older goods with newer. Yet here we have grocery price increases. Are salaries in the grocery production chain going up 18%? Warehouse costs? I doubt it. The price increases are mainly coming from elsewhere, not from money printing.
wholinator2 4y ago
Could you explain briefly what I'm looking at? I'm interested but honestly don't know where to start

baremetal 4y ago

> Are they all friends with each other and plan all their schemes together? They don't all have to actively conspire or even know one another for them to have a shared business interest.

aww_dang 4y ago

Do central bankers and other policy elites have no truck with financial elites? What does it mean when stimulus is injected into markets for the purpose of 'stabilizing' them? Are they not concerned with financial markets? This seems to be the directly stated objective of many economic policies. Is this a conspiracy theory or a simple observation of incentives?

bcrosby95 4y ago

It's not really an active conspiracy. It's just the rich pursuing their own interests. When the workers or poor pursue their interests too effectively, the rich in positions of power make them take their medicine. But when the rich do it too effectively, well, that's just the free market and you can't do anything about that.

fifticon 4y ago
i really don't like the way this medicine tastes.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

"rich" and "poor" are just holdovers from conquerer and conquered. Just because the mandate that one group acknowledge the other's right to create value by fiat (e.g. by stamping Caesar's face into a coin) is no longer delivered by guys with swords doesn't make it not a conspiracy by one group to keep another group in its place.

colossal 4y ago
well it still is delivered by guys with swords in a sense -- now they're just guys with guns and jumpsuits bearing the words "US ARMY."
- HPsquared 4y ago
  More like, "IRS". Taxation is the demand for the currency. Even if you conduct all trade with other people in seashells (or whatever), you'd still need to obtain dollars to pay your taxes.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  They got smarter about it in the late 70's. The rich don't even have to send guys anymore, they just send guns to the local thugs with an agreement that those thugs will, upon seizing power, hook the local economy into the US banking system. The thugs get to keep the loans, but the debt gets transferred to the local community, which cements the "somebody who isn't you gets to create abstractions that you have to treat as money"-part of the deal. The words that used to go with it are "progressive free-market policies", but I think Kamala Harris recently called it "anti-corruption" or something along those lines.

copymoro 4y ago

what he says, is but the way in which he conveys the meaning the rich by this point aren't any group of people, but a section of the system. the system is structural, not-alive. he is choosing to regard the system like rungs on a ladder. each rung is a social class. the point I'm making is that he's describing the "ladder", referring to structural/systemic aspects of our civilization, not the "persons" standing on each rung which is the meaning you chose to focus on. our society really is arranged in tiers or classes regardless of you accept it or not (but again, this is a way to understand it; there may be others) in the UK the so-called "rich" (to answer your question) would be people with legal noble titles. in Smerica this class of people is not explicit. I guess the older European system (which inspired American ones) at least is explicit about the fact that the royals and their nobles are "the rich" class. I countries with continuing monarchies, like the UK, they really have a noble title and registration. they're "better than you" by legal definition because of choices their parents and older ancestors made (or were forced to make)

bryanlarsen 4y ago

There's a good case to be made that Putin was the richest man in the world. Nobody's sure what he's worth, but it's quite likely it was more than the $200B Arnault has. And Putin is singularly responsible for a good chunk of the inflation. So blaming it on the rich might be appropriate, but not in the way that it's usually meant.

birdyrooster 4y ago
No sure why you are being down voted but the global recession and inflation is the result of Vladimir Putin's choices and virtually no one else.

ThunderSizzle 4y ago

[flagged]

SkipperCat 4y ago
The war in 100% the result of Putin. Putting the responsibility of this on Biden doesn't make sense. Besides, Russia was sending troops into eastern Ukraine since 2014, way before Biden took office.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  You showed the evidence in your own post. The return to Biden brought the return of typical American foreign policy, which Trump upset. This foreign policy plan has basically been the same under Bush, Obama, and Biden. The last time Putin pushed the Ukraine issue was under Obama. Under Trump’s watch, Putin didn't dare touch Ukraine. If I was Putin, and I wanted to invade a country, I would sure as hell prefer Biden as the opponent than Trump. Trump might actually finish the war before it starts. Biden is still trying to remember he's president.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    now the story changes: the war that putin started in 2014 is not the fault of Biden, but the fault of the foreign policy of everyone except the former guy? instead of the dude who actually started it with the invading? you also seem to misunderstand that Putin has been "touching Ukraine" since the war started in 2014, and the former guy did nothing to stop the war
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      I'm not saying Putin isn't responsible. That's as obvious as crickets. If people didn't commit evil, the world would be perfect. Obviously, people commit evil. However, if you are charged with authority, it is your responsibility to defend against evil, while also pushing to being about peace. Obama and Biden did not keep evil in check. Trump did so much more, as ironic as that may seem to you.

yulker 4y ago

If a particular group has converging interests and is facing a similar set of incentives, they don't need to be in an explicit "conspiracy" to be aligned. The emergent behavior in a system can both advantage a particular group at the expense of another without there needing to be a conspiracy whatsoever.

Closi 4y ago

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory - lots of companies are posting record profits right now as their prices have risen above the cost price inflation, so profiteering is a valid fourth class of price inflation.

gampleman 4y ago

I find it fairly unlikely that the rich in the UK don't actually know each other. The UK probably has the most developed class divide of most western countries, so in-class socialisation is a pretty big deal around here.

fifticon 4y ago
they very much do, and they go to the same schools. They even have a parliamentary chamber with socalled nobles.

trwhite 4y ago

I think it's in Hackers & Painters that Paul Graham talks about the commonly held view that wealth is like a pie, that one group of people having more somehow means others must have less. He's also immensely wealthy, so I take what he says with a pinch of salt

Tryk 4y ago

Consider the comparison between Norway and Sweden, two extremely similar countries in almost all respects. Food inflation in Sweden is 22.1% over 12-month [0] Food inflation in Norway is 8.8% over 12-months [1] Obviously someone is making money hand-over-fist from this 12.7% discrepancy. Comments like the one above are really disruptive to any constructive conversations. It is not a conspiracy. The comment above is (at best) astonishingly naïve. While it is a emotionally plausible argument, we can see it does not hold up if we compare the rates of inflation over similar countries. [0]: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/prices-and-consumption/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-cpi/pong/statistical-news/consumer-price-index-cpi-february-2023/ https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... [1]: https://www.ssb.no/en/priser-og-prisindekser/konsumpriser/statistikk/konsumprisindeksen https://www.ssb.no/en/priser-og-prisindekser/konsumpriser/st...

nradov 4y ago
Norway and Sweden are hardly similar in this respect. Norway is a net food exporter. Sweden is a net food importer. That alone can account for much of the discrepancy.
- Tryk 4y ago
  I don't quite understand what you mean- Could you ground you statement with some source?
  - nradov 4y ago
    It's pretty simple. Subtract the value of food imports from the value of food exports. If the value is positive then the country is a net exporter, and if it's negative then they're a net importer. Every major country imports some foodstuffs and exports others, but countries with a trade surplus are generally better positioned to handle food price inflation. https://www.nibio.no/en/news/ten-facts-about-the-norwegian-food-industry https://www.nibio.no/en/news/ten-facts-about-the-norwegian-f...
    - 4y ago

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

It is called "Greedflation". To say it is a conspiracy is true, in that corporations are conspiring against consumers to make more profit. Some articles: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/24/greedflation-are-large-firms-using-crises-as-cover-to-push-up-their-profits https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/24/greedflatio... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/greedflation-food-brands-may-be-profiteering-from-price-hikes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/greedflation-food-brands-may... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/12/global-greedflation-big-firms-drive-shopping-bills-to-record-highs https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/12/global-gree... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/02/ecb-looking-out-for-price-gouging-greedflation-price-rises-eurozone-inflation-profit-margins https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/02/ecb-looking...

prottog 4y ago
Corporations were never greedy until the last few years, I take it?
argentinian 4y ago
It's incredible, a lot of people in developed countries are thinking like argentinians now. In Argentina, the propagandist media companies that belong to politicians do everything in their hands to blame anyone for inflation, except for money printing policies dictated by politicians. And we have over 100% anual inflation.

selfmodruntime 4y ago

This is. Tired talking point and basically entirely lies. Necessity prices have risen by large margins in the name of inflation, but they have also recorded insane profits at historic levels.

wouldbecouldbe 4y ago

"They" are the wealthy people, property owners and such, in society who make a scene if their wealth gets taxed any higher. Every western society heavily taxes working, where often for me as a freelancer it hardly pays of to work more then 6-8 months per year. But taxes on wealth are very low. And owning property often has many tax cuts, and tends to benefit from low interest rates. The effect of it is is that either you play the wealth game through property or investing or you are lost out. I think it would be fare to protect the assets people accumulate through hard work, but at the same time it should be more balanced then it is now and we shouldnt all have to be financial experts.

fifticon 4y ago
it is known since the french revolution and marx, little has changed in that regard.

rcarr 4y ago

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 work and the poor tried to scrape by. In addition, covid contract schemes were widely abused by business owners, the most high profile case being that of Conservative peer Michele Mone who made off with £200 million. It is estimated that billions of pounds of public money has been irretrievably lost through what is essentially government neglect and corruption. On top of this, you've got Brexit which was orchestrated by the right wing conservative aristocracy class for their own benefit. And we've also had a conservative government that has not only not pursued a green agenda over the last 13 years, but bent over backwards to get Russian energy money. So yes, the factors leading to inflation were outside of control. But that doesn't change the fact that the powers that be in this country have been running the country in their own self interests and have given up on even pretending otherwise and that is why the UK is being hit harder by inflation than any other country in the western world. They were so high on their own supply they even elected Liz Truss to cut taxes in an inflationary environment and only reluctantly accepted that they weren't going to get away with it when the global market responded by saying it would tank the property market (which the whole stack of cards relies on). > Are they all friends with each other and plan all their schemes together?) against the “others”. This is the UK with it's notorious and very real class and aristocracy system. They don't call the royal family "the firm" for nothing.

dukeyukey 4y ago
> that is why the UK is being hit harder by inflation than any other country in the western world I don't think that's true. Right now, UK inflation is lower than almost any European country east of Germany, including Sweden, and it seems inflation was running lower throughout COVID than even the US.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Please send me links if you've got any because this is conflicting with what I have been reading so it would be nice to have a more balanced view if this is the case.

wwweston 4y ago

> 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?) No of course not. That'd be 90s-Mr-Burns territory. Nowadays you pay a SaaS offering to do it for you if you're a landlord: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r... So the question is -- is real estate the only market you'd do that in? Seems unlikely. "If I had to guess, I would bet that the big food conglomerates have all signed up with some common AI-backed pricing software package, and that shares data between them. Or, at the very least, they've all started using AI algorithms to increase or decrease production of any number of goods to maximize their profits based on real-time sales and economic data. And since they're all probably contracting this out to the same or a handful of similar AI firms, the conclusions they reach are similar. If all the production companies are running algorithms that tell them to jack up their prices at the same time, well they all jack up their prices at the same time. They don't actually have to meet in some smoke-filled backroom to plot a price-increase conspiracy. They just all run similar algorithms that respond the same way to market trends. The consumer market is highly consolidated, with most goods having just 1-3 producers. If those few producers all sign up for the same AI price-setting software, there won't be price competition to punish needless price increases." https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/11gwm2y/european_central_bank_confronts_a_cold_reality/jarv9rg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/11gwm2y/europea...

JaimeThompson 4y ago

The rich are those who can get high level politicians on the phone quickly to discuss their issues while the non-rich are those who can't do that.

bakugo 4y ago

This comment is bizarre. Corporations taking advantage of the current economic climate to make a profit is a conspiracy now? Most of the large corporations responsible for selling these supposedly "inflated" goods are posting record profits with no shame, and here you are covering your eyes and ears to defend them.

G3rn0ti 4y ago
Inflation means price increases across all actors in an economy. Large corporations also have to pay higher production costs now. So all these „profits“ are eaten up by the price increases those corporations see, too. I don’t think you have a valid understanding of what a „profit“ really is…
- bakugo 4y ago
  > So all these „profits“ are eaten up by the price increases those corporations see, too. I don’t think you have a valid understanding of what a „profit“ really is… Uh, you should google what the word "profit" means. You're thinking of "revenue".
  - G3rn0ti 4y ago
    Er, nope. You are mixing it up, I am sorry. Profit = revenue minus all expenses. So if prices are rising, revenue grows but profit stays the same as expenses are driven up too by inflated prices of the factors of production. But it’s a typical observation I have whenever discussing economics with Europeans — economic illiteracy is rampant, here, unfortunately, because schools do not give much priority to basic economic facts.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      > I have whenever discussing economics with Europeans — economic illiteracy is rampant The economic illiteracy would be not being aware that all those megacorps are posting record profits and trying to gloss it over with made-up theories of your own and accusing an entire continent of people with economic illiteracy in the process: https://theconversation.com/food-giants-reap-enormous-profits-during-times-of-crisis-184223 https://theconversation.com/food-giants-reap-enormous-profit... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-profits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/business/food-prices-prof... If their costs were rising more than their revenue, they wouldnt post record profits. They are posting record profits. You are simply wrong. You just !made up! a theory to avoid the actual reality. Why have you made such a blunt, exaggerated, false statement like 'European economic illiteracy' without doing so much as a google search. Do you know how that made you look...

havblue 4y ago

The "who are the elites?" question is one that many people struggle with when looking for who to point a finger at for modern economic woes. A lot us who post on this site are in technical fields and are well-compensated. So it wouldn't shock me if many people in the world consider "us" to be part of "them". In this case though, we're simply talking about inflation. One cause of inflation that you've neglected to mention is quantitative easing and how it's been used to artificially lower interest rates while allowing for higher deficits. I'd suggest you start there before you strawman people who disagree with you as "conspiracy theorists"...

t0bia_s 4y ago

It doesnt matter what you think. Poor people that loose money without possibility to do anything about it = angry people. That is a big problem. We know from history the consequence of terrible inflation in 30's in Germany.

hnburnsy 4y ago

Why does Brexit have to equal "increased bureaucracy at the border"? Is it due to the lifelong bureaucrats that loves enforcing it? An effective government should do everything in its power to reduce the bureaucracy in extraordinary times.

goneri 4y ago
They've decided to leave the European Common Market, which was precisely designed to avoid the bureaucracy and reduce the burden of the customs procedures.
Scarblac 4y ago
All countries have customs checks, to check that incoming goods conform with regulations, applicable tariffs are paid, etc. Except countries in the EU, which has a common market that made such checks unnecessary inside of it. Of course there are still customs on the outside EU border. So if you leave that, and your borders are now not internal market borders anymore but your and the EU's external borders, you're going to do more customs checks than you used to have. In both directions.
CydeWeys 4y ago
There's two sides to every trading relationship. Even if the UK tries to reduce bureaucracy on their side, there's still all the bureaucracy on the side of the other countries they're trading with. And they literally just torpedoed all their trade relationships by leaving a large customs union that allowed them to trade with a large number of important partners with significantly reduced bureaucracy. I agree with you that bureaucracy here is the problem, and Brexit was the cause of it.
gilessbrown 4y ago
The Brexit slogan was "Taking back control of our borders". Please explain how can you do that without increasing "bureaucracy"?

isaacremuant 4y ago

The corporations lobby the gov and both enrich each other. It's not a conspiracy but a well known aspect of the modern world. It breaks democracy benefitting a few in power. The effects of covid are actually the effects of covid policies which benefited govs and big tech and other corporation's while screwing most people. Yes, it appears that people wanted it but when you consider the censorship, behaviour modification propaganda and unconstitutional state force application to suppress people who wanted to oppose them, it's not that clear of a picture. Then Ukraine, also something that benefits the gov, the energy/war companies and corporations, and not the people. Also heavily propagandized to push more profiteering through endless war. No conspiracy. Just the system at work and people like you dismissing the true criticism with the same old labels. You may feel an impulse to call me fascist, racist and other customary labels soon, heh.

ocbyc 4y ago

I had to scroll down to far. Cheap nuclear energy now!

boredhedgehog 4y ago

> Energy price surges caused by the Ukraine war Do you mean the sanctions our rulers voluntarily chose to impose on that sector? Or is there something intrinsic to the war that would have that effect?

drewcoo 4y ago

> stop this conspiracy talk about the “rich” creating inflation to disown the “poor” You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. - George Carlin

briantakita 4y ago

"Oops...did I do that?" is a comedic phrase uttered by someone who makes a mistake which harms others but benefits them. Call it whatever you want, i.e. "Conspiracy theory", but you cannot deny who is harmed & who benefits.

fear_and_coffee 4y ago

[dead]

hgomersall 4y ago

Someone is always profiting from inflated prices. I suspect it's not the poor.