We’ve all been way too accepting of inflation | Hacker News Reader

We’ve all been way too accepting of inflation

bloomberg.com

62 pointsctoth48 comments

This is a really weird article

"The women-led grocery store boycotts of the 1960s in the US were ultimately unsuccessful, and inflation was only stamped out years later by the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to punishing levels. But today’s consumers have a far more effective tool than placards — social media. "

K. So it hasn't worked in the past and Federal Reserve Hiking did?

"Leaving a one-star Google review for a price-gouging local business or a TikTok campaign against a bigger target might sound anti-business. But in fact it’s far better for the economy (and stock prices) than massive rate hikes that cause unnecessary unemployment. "

This borders on parody. Individuals are supposed to figure out what price increases are necessary and which are price gouging themselves. I hear people shout price gouging when a restaurant has to increase their burger prices, this is a nonstarter and will simply be noise.

"So far, consumers have mostly gone about tackling inflation quietly by, for example, switching from household-name brands to supermarkets’ cheaper private-label goods, turning to no-frills stores like Aldi and Lidl, or making products last longer."

So the brands that increase their prices too much suffer and the ones that don't lose customers. Why are you writing this article?

The rate hikes just coincided with the energy crisis easing, which actually did resolve inflation, so I still strongly believe the hikes themselves didn’t do anything to help bring down inflation (but did cause unnecessary unemployment). But yeah, the grocery store boycotts wouldn’t have done anything either…

“Greed is good”, say the capitalists, except in the case of rising workforce salaries which is bad and requires intervention by the Federal Reserve.

Greed is the necessary evil of capitalism. Fair markets are the necessary counter.

Also, notice how they specify leaving negative reviews for “local businesses”, and not focusing on the big companies that can afford to lower their margins. And then, continue on to say we are suffering “quietly” by reducing the money we give name brands.

This is an article trying (and failing) to convince people to complain on social media and continue to spend money on expensive name brand foods, rather than taking actions that hurt megacorp bottom lines.

I'm confused.

As an American consumer I thought I was suppose to spend money to fuel the economy. Now this article says I am ruining the economy by causing inflation and I should be selective about how I spend my money. This seems crazy, because if everyone gravitates to the few goods that are not experiencing inflation then the demand for those will cause a supply shortage which might lead to higher prices....

Virtually all food stuff, all transportation options, all housing options, all educational services, and all medical care has been hit hard by inflation over the last 3+ years. Is this bloomberg columnist asking that we just don't participate in those sectors of the economy?

No, this bloomberg columnist is just writing what their bosses want them to write. Its mass manipulation on a grand scale, they want to blame the consumer for inflation, instead of the real cause.

Anyone that knows anything realizes what a shill position this is. In many respects, we really need to start punishing businesses that engage in malign influence campaigns.

Its just like this article here. Completely false if you look at the publicly released data, but they still publish it, and if you are too dumb to tell otherwise you end up supporting them.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/location-location-locatio...

No, you see, they saved up a bunch of cash on hand and are waiting for you to stop spending. When you stop spending companies will downsize and large amount of unemployment will occur. This will lead to huge amount of foreclosures and a deflationary cycle. Then when prices are low they'll strike with their cash on hand buying up these cheap assets and win the game of capitalism as they strike it rich in the next inflationary cycle.

Bingo! This is exactly what's happening.

The economic situation has changed! In the post-2008 era, we suffered from weak demand, and “stimulating the economy” and “creating jobs” were good things. Now we have the opposite problems; restraining spending and being efficient with labor are in again.

I know we’re not supposed to gripe about moderation, but I wish that there was a guideline to prefix the title with “Opinion:”. A lot of people see the domain bloomberg.com and assume “news”.

I can see that being a problem in a lot of cases, but in this the title would seem to be sufficient to the reader to indicate this is a probably opinion piece. "We’ve all been way too accepting of inflation" is literally an opinion.

Hard not to "accept" inflation when life's necessities are priced on markets experiencing inflation...

What does "consumer pushback" even mean? How does one "vote with your dollar" in a captured market? Does Bloomberg think "protests" are going to do anything except feed the culture wars by giving fodder to news media outlets' spin doctors?

Seriously. Great comment.

Example: Food price inflation is not something one can choose to accept or reject, you have to eat regardless. When all the grocery stores and farmer's markets (and everything in between) all have relatively similar if not equal pricing on the most basics one needs (fresh veggies and fruit), there's no choice, not even an illusion of choice.

This article misses the point completely - we depend on our elected officials to rid us of inflation, but unfortunately they've become victim to regulatory capture, or worse - political pressure.

JPowell is a terrible central banker, regardless of what happens going forward. It's not all Biden's fault, either, no matter what the media wants anyone to think.

Well if veggies are so expensive why don't they buy cake?

Ha! Cake, despite being loaded with preservatives and cheap sugars, is incredibly expensive. I have celiac disease so gluten-free cakes are my only option if I want cake, and those cakes are, well, prohibitively expensive. shit even gluten-free cake/cookie/brownie mix is like $18-20 which is crazy.

I wanted a quick binge treat last week and two slices of grocery store cake were $12.99. I actually didn't eat cake, nor the $3 apple that I walked by on the way to the cake department.

For those who didn't seem to get it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

You can value shop, like buy asparagus when it is $1.99/lbs and not when it is $4.99/lbs. I’m pretty picky at the store, and usually what’s on sale is fresher anyways. Your costs still go up, of course, but it keeps grocery stores on their toes at least.

We are all to blame for inflation: we just got addicted to cheap money, and were not willing to vote for longer term economic health, the politicians just gave us what we wanted.

We also had a massive pandemic that shut down half the economy and we took fiscal and monetary action to get through it with minimal chaos. I feel like we need to remind each other of that from time to time, lest we just forget these extraordinary events.

The cheap money was stressing the system before the pandemic relief came in and made everything fall over. You can't cut rates unless you are prepared to raise them, cheap money only works as stimulus if you make money more expensive in good times.

If we were more conservative with our monetary policy, then we could have prepared better for the next stress event. At least we could stop things from getting crazy (e.g. the housing market). We've basically forgotten the 90s already.

The cheap money was not stressing the system. That’s the reason interest rates went back down after a brief rise in the late 2010s: everyone was worried about a recession and there was absolutely no sign of inflation in consumer prices.

It totally was. There were plenty of signs of inflation in consumer prices, but more importantly in housing, we just chose to ignore them all like ostriches sticking heads in sand.

Bloomberg thinks if your attention is divided enough, and if they can cause enough disunity, they can continue business as usual.

Food security is at the top of a short list on what causes unrest, historically speaking.

Its beyond being just stupid, but lets be clear, these people are really stupid psychopaths seeking profit, and they have the pull to do it until they don't.

Coercion and Compulsion are intolerable acts and parties have gotten started for these things before (1767-1776)

One thing that we've all been even more accepting of is the assumption that the federal debit limit will be cooperatively raised every time a new spending bill is passed. The limit was enacted for a good reason, but somehow each spending bill warrants an exception to the rule. Spending is completely out of control and all political parties should agree on this.

Wow, what a coincidence - companies decide to get greedier at the same time as massive government deficit spending and global productivity loss.

This article talks about "justifying" profits. I think that's backwards. Profits justify businesses - making a profit is why people make cars, beers, whatever. Companies don't have to justify their profits if their consumers are willing to buy them.

The article mentions the spike in profits for Cal-Maine foods. That's well trod ground for this discussion. The author also, to his credit, mentions that avian flu devastated competitors flocks (50+ million birds killed) but didn't touch Cal-Maine. The other part of the puzzle is that Cal-Maine had a bad fiscal year the year before so year over year profits look like a huge spike.

I don't really see how you can discuss inflation without recognizing that the creation of lots of new dollars is going to play a big role. If we start regulating profits we will disrupt markets, not make them more productive.

Regulate monopolies.

Deeper regulation doesn't do what you think it would.

They need to retool the incentives and taxes, basically make it so its not worth growing beyond 8% marketshare.

Anything larger and you get coercion, influence, and monopolistic practices.

I'm from a country of 100% inflation. I've heard this song before. The only complacency is for people to believe that inflation is for companies to make more money, that its because greed, or that the government can't do anything. History repeats itself

This take seems ignorant of basic economics. Profits are up because of supply constraints leading to a supply/demand mismatch; blaming it on consumers “passively accepting” price increases is just as ridiculous as calling it “corporate greed”.

The article specifically says that it's not just supply constraints. "The idea that corporate profit expansion has been a big driver of inflation was once mostly confined to trade unions and left-wing academics, but it’s now taken seriously by central bankers."

Updated to add: While pure inflation may be driven by the amount of money in a system, prices can also increase for entirely different reasons. (The authors even cite the newly-coined term "excuseflation".)

The two authors of this piece previously wrote for the Financial Times, so they have a lot of credibility.

I think they have less credibility after writing this article. Corporate profits don't change the amount of money in a system which is what drives inflation.

This is, apparently, a frequent misunderstanding of inflation. Inflation means prices go up. That's it. It can be because of an increase in the money supply, but it can also be because of an increase in demand, or a decrease in supply. People tend to use the misunderstanding to push a specific agenda, I've noticed.

> The two authors of this piece previously wrote for the Financial Times, so they have a lot of credibility.

Honestly, taking their work on its face, they really don't have any credibility.

They misattribute, and show a complete lack of understanding regarding what drives cost-push inflation. They promote misleading and false ideas about what you can do about it too.

People have no say about what prices are when business sector concentration exceeds a certain point, they have to feed themselves.

The article is garbage, and sector concentration is or has exceeded what was previously known during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

Corporate profits are high. That they can do this is a function of the ultimate source of the problem: lack of competition. In a competitive environment, businesses would be less able to pass costs onto the consumer.

It is time for the anti-trust machinery to start working again.

Are the profit margins unusually high, though?

In my country yes.

Which country? That context helps the discussion without it the discussion stops.

I find it curious to talk about basic economics when referring to the cost and supply of money.

Money is subject to centralized control and manipulation by a quasi-private entity (the Federal Resserve) which holds a monopoly on the cost and supply of money.

Remember, money accounts for half of every transaction in our economy. When one-half of every transaction is controlled by a centralized monopoly, we do not in fact have a free market subject to the laws of economics.

"We" have? Speak for yourself, Bloomberg.

The unfortunate thing is that the government has a monopoly on violence and a completely captured voting system. We poor citizens don't have the right to accept or decline anything related.

Regardless, even if you reject their on violence who are you gonna shoot? Responsibility is so diffuse that nobody you shoot will be seen to have "had it coming". This is a feature, not a bug.

how about the ones that think you can print infinite money without it causing inflation?

Even these people aren't directly responsible. The directly responsible ones, for the most part, don't appear in public records.

> The directly responsible ones, for the most part, don't appear in public records.

Could you list them?

Unfortunately no. It's constantly changing, and you only get a peak into how it all works when there's a massive expose/leak such as the Panama Papers.

The headline is a tautology. By definition inflation is a different way of saying that buyers accept to pay higher prices for the same goods and services.

yes yes we get it you have a bunch of short positions

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