I feel similar, from everything I've read, historically creating money causes inflation. We created money and we got inflation. What am I missing?
And by all accounts the people don't have any more money. In fact, governments around the world have been creating support packages to deal with the people not having more money to support the rising prices. This suggests that it is supply-side driven, and I'm going to suggest food in particular.
The farm price for food started rising at the beginning of the pandemic when labour was difficult to secure amid illness. Then came the big fertilizer crunch which remains ongoing. Then the war in Ukraine, Europe's bread basket. And now there are looming fears over diesel availability. A quadruple whammy in short succession for something that everyone has to buy.
Saving rates are crashing to support this temporary blip, but with very little income growth it doesn't look sustainable. You can't have inflation if people don't have money to spend. As we start to solve some of our food issues, fertilizer in particular, a massive deflationary event seems quite likely.
The connection isn't all that obvious, but there is indeed a connection between fresh money being invested in financial asset XY and price for bread rising. Even though the investor did not buy up piles of bread, they created pressure on some scarce resources in the value chain on the way to bread. Those are energy, base materials, labour force, ...
Whenever an institution (central bank, commercial bank, ..) creates fresh money and this money gets invested in something, a portion of total global resource allocation (towards different end products) gets shifted. Shifted means that some end products see an increase of costs in their value chain, which leads to higher prices.
Example: commercial banks in some country xy are allowed to lend more due to some changes in the rules for fractional reserve banking. The banks currently have some kind of skew in their allocation of lending, meaning they don't just lend exactly proportional to current total allocation of credit. Let's say they lend more (in respect to current allocation) to real estate development businesses than to bakeries. This means that the real estate sector now has more bidding power for all the scarce resources (energy, raw materials, ...) than the bread sector. So there's new demand for energy from the real estate sector which makes energy prices rise. Voilà, bakeries spend more on energy, bread prices rise as well.
And all that without "someone buying up all the bread".
Injecting fresh money in the financial sector will lead to real world resource reallocation, which will put pressure on sectors that don't even seem to be involved.
In the long run, but it is not uncommon to see production lose money when their input costs are higher than the consumer price. A vendor is still beholden to what someone will pay and when you have to pay for your inputs before proving what the end consumer will pay, you can quickly be left holding the bag. This corrects eventually, but not usually within the span of days or even months. It can often take years to see things correct.
You still can't have inflation if the people don't have money. A business can't magically charge more than someone is willing and able to pay. And they say the people don't have more money to pay with, currently subsisting on draining their savings, so inflation will be short lived – unless incomes start to rise. The FED is working tirelessly to try and prevent that from happening, but we'll see.
You're aware that especially bakeries have been raising prices very promptly all over the world.
True, price raises do have delays in some cases (rents) but generally for most common services and products that people buy in everyday life, if there's no cartel messing with prices, they will very consistently and without years of delays increase when inputs become more expensive.
> You still can't have inflation if the people don't have money.
This might be true for the more dispensible items in the basket but I'd say for real necessities it's mostly wrong. People who have little money will first shift their expenses from less necessary things to essentials. Even if people don't have more money, they will have to spend more on the things they continue buying. This is exactly what's happening right now, almost everywhere.
> A business can't magically charge more than someone is willing and able to pay.
Unless there are subsidies by the state that try to keep the businesses afloat. These are very pervasive.