Inflation from Money Printing, Survival, or Greed?

[BlueWaterSailor]

Just a basic study of their systems should suffice to back up my claims. And just a few counter examples suffice to prove that the relationship does not hold as you claimed...

[sigh] And... it's too stupid to take the well-deserved L in time. Obviously a part of the "I'll just move the stop away from the price, 'cause it just HAS to recover" gang. Oh well... someone has to provide the liquidity and the good fills for the rational people among us. I suppose we should be grateful.

A tip for the economically and historically-ignorant among us: Bismarck created socialized medicine in Germany to shut out the socialists' bid for power (it was a major part of their platform.) That's why Lasalle and Marx ended up powerless - in prison/as outcasts respectively. This system was assiduously maintained by Hitler when he came to power - National Socialists, so not exactly a surprise - and it's remained a part of the German sociopolitical structure (although with many improvements) to this day.

A quick lookup says that ~90% of the population is on the mandatory state insurance plan - although anyone who can afford it buys private insurance instead. In other words, it's almost entirely a government-controlled system - meaning there's no competition. It's possible to argue that this is how services of this sort should be, including within a free-market system - Friedrich Hayek certainly did - but it means that the competitive market dynamics

DO
NOT
APPLY.

Here endeth the lesson. Go thy merry mindless way without having understood any of it, as usual.

 

[zdreg]

Just a basic study of their systems should suffice to back up my claims. And just a few counter examples suffice to prove that the relationship does not hold as you claimed...

If you believe that gov't bureaucrats can provide better a outcome than millions of people and businesses acting in their owns interests a.k.a. free market how much room is left for discussion?

 

[Cuddles]

 

[M.W.]

Is this a joke? Are you suggesting it's better to run an economy without any regulations and guidelines and prosecution upon the violation thereof? If that's the case then truly there is not much left to discuss. The US ranks lower across an average of a large, diversified set of metrics than 30 other industrialized developed nations, almost all of them having implemented more stringent regulations towards corporations and business entities.

If you believe that gov't bureaucrats can provide better a outcome than millions of people and businesses acting in their owns interests a.k.a. free market how much room is left for discussion?

 

[Businessman]

Of the take away food places i used to regularly use:

Most increased prices by around 10 to 15%.
One did not increase prices at all.
One increased by 50%, I have stopped using this one completely.

I really should give the one that hasn't increased prices at all more of my business. But i have cut back on everything where i can in general.


Also i did notice yesterday price of an extra breakfast Hashbrown at MacDs was £1.49, used to 69p not long ago.

 

[smallfil]

What is being ignored by many complaining about higher food prices in the grocery stores is that shipping costs to haul one container van of food to a grocery chain branch has gone up by quite a bit. A Kroger executive was interviewed on TV and asked about high food prices. He said before a container van of food to a Kroger grocery would cost $7,000 per delivery. Now, that same delivery is costing $18,000 per trip. Of course, Kroger offsets the shipping costs by raising the price of practically, everything. An independent truck driver said, he will have to raise his prices to haul goods because the price of diesel to run his truck has gone up so much. Oil is highly inflationary. When you refine crude oil, you get asphalt, aviation fuel, liquified petroleum gas, diesel, gasoline, etc. In addition, it is also used to manufacture plastics. What Joe Biden, Democrats and green energy activists get very wrong is that, green energy will not replace oil anytime soon. I worked for an oil company before. And our company had researched alternative sources of energy, solar, win, geothermal, etc. What we found out was that alternative energy is very expensive and available in small quantities only to be viable. If they can replace oil, they would have done so, 10, 20, 30 years ago. Still, oil is the main source of energy in the planet. Joe Biden and Democrats war on US oil companies, hurts the US and increases inflation by leap and bounds. Sanctions on Russia hurts the US and Europe more than Russia itself. Europe on the verge of recession, US is next as we depend on Europe to sell a lot of US goods.

 

[Stratter]

View attachment 297905View attachment 297906

It's not a secret, it's just very hard to calculate what percentage of the price increases is due to inflation and what due to corporate greed. My personal opinion is that it doesn't even come down to these two, because they are intertwined. What is inflation after all, it is not just a number you hear in reports, it affects your day-to-day operations as a business and as e person. And what is greed exactly - if you are forced to raise prices, because the price of everything else is rising at what point do you say to your self "that's enough, let's not make it too hard on the people that pay for my services"? That's an unrealistic way to expect people to act in, of course you are going to squeeze as much profits as you can while you can, given that you've made the right judgement about the level at which it would be detrimental to your business because you would be chasing clients away.

 

[Stratter]

And maybe it is most important that it's just how things work. I imagine it this way - the past decade or so, if you wanted to operate on a smaller scale, with a smaller leverage, both in your life and in your business - you were destined to fail, barely survive and/or be left out of your playing field as not being competitive. It was that kind of reality - it paid to put on more risk - get a bigger loan, get a bigger house and car, shoot for the stars with everything you do, grow your business as big as you can. If you did not do it, others would be doing it and you were going to be left behind. So, the reasonable thing to do, to have a financial cushion for a long enough period of time, would mean that you have less funds for growth and expansion, and by default you were going to lose the race with others, that operate on a less financially reasonable level. At some point the times start to change - you don't get paid to take on more risk and seek growth, you get paid to be smaller, more liquid, more conservative, live and operate your business below your means. The hard part is seeing when the times change and changing alongside with them, because most of the people become accustomed to their ways and can't decouple themselves from their old ways.

 

[unconventional wisdom]

corporate greed will work until it doesn't. eg., if Starbucks charges $8 for a cup of coffee, that gives a local shop a chance to open and charge $7, etc. capitalism works. for things like hotels and airlines that use membership and points for rewards, higher pricing can be more resilient.

 

[Cuddles]

corporate greed will work until it doesn't. eg., if Starbucks charges $8 for a cup of coffee, that gives a local shop a chance to open and charge $7, etc. capitalism works. for things like hotels and airlines that use membership and points for rewards, higher pricing can be more resilient.

except competition does not mean they won't still gouge. Take your 7$ coffee cup as an example. The competition will only undercut the monopoly to still maximize profit. The question is why aren't we going to the 7$/cup place instead of starbux, the question is wtf is coffee 7$ to begin with.

We could be waiting decades before the spaceX of coffee shows up