kalm wrote: ↑Fri May 26, 2023 7:26 am
GannonFan wrote: ↑Fri May 26, 2023 7:14 am
Sure, you can use that as the takeaway if you don't read the article and just go with the meme, but that's not what the article said. It was pretty clear in the article that inflation wasn't driven by the companies, rather they are passing on the costs of the inflation to their customers. Inflation is still there, and the original sources of it (i.e. excessive government spending and lack of control by the Fed - as always, inflation is a money supply issue, and corporations are not in charge of controlling the supply of money) are still unchanged. How the companies react to the inflation doesn't change the narrative of how inflation got out of the barn door in the first place. But of course, why let the details and complexity of this get in the way of a really good Twitter post to push another point?
So inflating prices which increases already rising inflation is good for the overall economy how?
It's not necessarily good or bad. Corporations, like any business large or small, will try to anticipate where prices will be x number of months ahead of time since typically supply chains and lead times are measured in months (if not longer) rather than just days. And yes, in all likelihood, they'll err on the side of increasing prices more than they think they need to, if they can, to make sure they don't lose money. As with any rampant inflationary cycle, labor costs are almost always the last thing to catch up with inflation. What the article said was "good" about this particular inflation surge was that the ability of companies to raise their costs during this period meant that other methods to protect profit margins, such as large scale layoffs, haven't been necessary in most industries. The article does mention that the contribution of profit growth to inflation have been falling for the past 12 months as the labor costs have been catching up (most labor costs only change once per year thanks to annual reviews).
And of course, all of this wouldn't have been necessary or happening if we didn't screw the pooch and let inflation get out of control in the first place, but hey, I guess we needed to test modern monetary theory on a grand scale just to prove once again that there is no such thing as free money. I'm sure it won't be the last time we need to test out that idea.