Here we go again with "Inflation is being driven by companies that somehow just discovered monopolistic practices in 2020, coincidentally at the same time of the largest government stimulus in decades"
So dumb and out of touch. Should be self evident especially to the people here who lived the tech boom money explosion that that stimulus lead to.
One, insulting and name calling doesn’t further the discussion.
Two, is there any concrete evidence that may change your mind from the current position of “businesses can’t have done anything bad so if anything has gone bad it’s the government’s fault”? If yes, and if the standards for proof are reasonable, others may try to find such evidence or fail to, thus furthering the conversation. If not, consider how dogmatic your position is, and how you can open up your mind for fruitful conversations.
You know what else is out of touch? A lack of nuance. For instance the boom in tech is only one small part of the actual story. It gives several other examples such as price fixing in Ag, the rental economy, even tipping.
To your point, at the same time as the post-covid price fixing was going on The Fed was blaming inflation on "a current labor force shortfall of roughly 3-1/2 million people,"[1] which drives up wages, which drives up prices, which drives up inflation.
So there's truth to what you're saying (we didn't even get into stimulus checks), but there's truth beyond it as well, and this article brings up good points.
The stimulus checks are meaningless and not at all what I mean by "stimulus"
You can tell someone is a layman on the topic if they think "stimulus" refers to stimulus checks. What the gov and the fed did on the backend was so insane in scale, and seemingly few people actually grasp it, swimming in a swamp of "greedflation" and "wage war" articles. They actually think people like me are talking about a few dinky checks...
I said we "didn't even get into" stimulus checks. So what's your point again, or were you just trying to grab any one point you could to refute with bile?
Just look at those charts and then tell me how "price fixing" drove inflation more than "tons of cash in consumers pockets". No shit companies jacked prices, consumers where stacked with cash.
So dumb and out of touch. Should be self evident especially to the people here who lived the tech boom money explosion that that stimulus lead to.