For example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/koch-e2-80-99s-foundation-...
Grocery prices have been rising since the start of the pandemic. Far more people are now accustomed to cooking at home. Anecdotally, I am one of them. I buy at least twice as many groceries as I did pre-pandemic and that is not going to change. Also the pandemic is still in full force internationally, especially in places where the US sources major food imports.
Clothing is up because commerce with the Chinese textile industry was shut down during the pandemic. It will take at least another year before clothing prices are restored.
Notice that the massive spikes in real estate prices are not even mentioned in the article. This is a propaganda piece. It cherrypicks items that poor people depend on in order to promote backlash against redistribution.
The trouble is that there's a strong strain of left-wing populism in the US based around a view of the economy that is simple, gives someone convenient to blame (the evil wealthy corporate class sitting on all the wealth like dragons on hoards), and bears almost no resemblance to the way the world really works. Which is why you still get people pushing for wealth redistribution as a solution to this inflation, even though the very argument that was being used to call for it before means that it will make the inflation problem worse.
Either the respondents are not a representative sample of consumers, in which case the article's conclusions are of little value; or something other than increased consumer spending, like supply chain issues, is causing the inflation.
GDP only dropped 2.3% last year [0], so there's approximately the same amount of stuff to buy.
The linked article reads to me like an incoherent attempt to scare people into thinking the stimulus was a bad idea.
[0] https://www.bea.gov/news/2021/gross-domestic-product-4th-qua...
This can occur because companies lay off employees due to rising costs and lack of demand (while raising their own prices) or because the money is going to some alternate consumption.
Food prices could increase today simply because one or more of the beneficiaries of those trillions of dollars has allocated it to land acquisition. Retiring of productive capacity for other "economic" purposes will increase inflation.
I agree entirely. But the linked article explicitly blames increased deficit government spending. The article reads like a stealth attack on stimulus, with the implicit point that inflation should be controlled by ending it, rather than looking more deeply at causes like the ones you suggest -- which might lead to solutions that a Forbes contributor might not like, like taxing the rich.
However, in the US the investment rate is going up and businesses are expanding production. The biggest factor right now is the semiconductor shortage and there it is just a matter of time before things return to normal.
We capture increased production and investment in speculative assets as economic growth when it may not yield any new production.
My (naive) understanding is these are tightly linked. The process is something like:
=> Consumers have more cash to spend on goods.
=> Consumers buy more goods
=> More demand is created for commodities to build those goods
=> Demand for commodities exceeds demand
=> Commodity prices inflate
=> Manufactured good prices inflateAs incomes are still fixed and there are cheaper substitutes for almost everything you want to eat people will modify and reduce.
I tend to agree that all the inflation we are seeing right now is supply chain related (with the one exception of graphics cards - the liquidity injected into the system probably made price of crypto go up which accelerated the demand for GPUs, so the GPU issue is both a supply problem & demand problem)
That's not to say prices haven't been suppressed over the years in various ways that combat normal inflation (6oz denim Jeans that are now 10% Spandex I'm looking at you) and there's a ton of money in the system that have mostly went into assets.
[0] https://www.bea.gov/news/2021/gross-domestic-product-4th-qua...
Your response illustrates the likelihood that the article is a stealth attack on government stimulus to the non-rich, to deflect the possibility of more straightforward solutions, like curtailing stimulus to the rich.
You're looking at the total supply (which is true in the long term, since those dollars have to be spent eventually). However, inflation in the short term has much more to do with velocity and actual spending - if all of that money just sits in bank accounts, there will be no inflation.
So looking at the money supply in isolation will tell you nothing about the actual inflation. It's about what's happening to that money.
The printing isn’t really the problem either, it’s a symptom of policies from both parties for 50-60 years resulting in a nation that functions purely on debt from individual households, small businesses, publicly traded businesses, to the government itself.
Before the pandemic the majority of households couldn’t cover a $400 emergency. But the truth is businesses and governments were in the same position, and even in “the greatest economy the world has ever seen” the majority of them live the equivalent of paycheck to paycheck just servicing their debts.