Schrodinger’s commencement speech:

When an economy undergoes inflation, not all prices rise by the same amount. That’s one of the reasons high inflation can be so disruptive. For example, wages (the price of labor) often rise some time after other prices, to the detriment of some wage earners.

It’s pretty believable that grocery store chains have acquired enough market power that they’re able to pass on all their cost increases to customers, and more, thereby increasing their profit rate. But the fact that individual companies and sectors are well placed to cope with inflation doesn’t explain the economy-wide and world-wide inflation.

We can also look at the “companies have market power” explanation using the overall labour share, which measures how much income is going to labor vs capital, economy wide. It doesn’t seem to have shifted much during the recent bout of inflation. But again, individual wage earners have seen huge disparities, including some who have been made much worse off by the inflation.

No, interest rate hikes significantly postdated the inflation. Fed started hiking in March 2022, and by that time annualized CPI inflation rate had reached 8 percent. Average over 2021 was 4.7 percent. In any case, interest rates increases are to combat inflation, they are not a cause of inflation

Moreover, wages did go up. US median personal income went from $35.8k in 2020 to $40.5k in 2022. Maybe it didn’t go up as much as other prices, but there’s nothing that says all prices have to rise by exactly the same amount during an inflationary episode.

So companies in all markets in all countries attained this market concentration at the same time, triggering this? And it just happened to coincide with a big expansion in the money supply, but the expansion in money supply had nothing to do with the inflation?

So your story is that when all other prices happen to go up, lots of greedy companies conspire to up their prices. But why do the initial prices start going up to kick this off? Cosmic coincidence? Or is it conspiracy embedded in conspiracy?

In macroeconomics, the motivations of individual firms don’t matter, or at least we just assume all firm behave as self-interestedly as they can get away with. This was as true in the 2010s, when inflation was low, as today when inflation is high. What matters are things like fiscal policy, monetary policy, inflation expectations, etc. Not how greedy companies are – we can assume they always are greedy.

So, why didn’t all these companies collude to fix prices before? Were they virtuous before? Did their turn to the dark side just happen to coincide with a large unfunded fiscal expansion?

Left to their own devices, companies want to raise prices and always have. You need a way to explain why they didn’t hike prices in the 2010s, when they were presumably just as greedy as they are now.

Put another way, inflation is about the loss of value of money itself, not individual prices going up. That’s a matter of macroeconomics: government spending, money supply, trade, etc.

Inflation is a macroeconomic phenomenon. It’s silly to attack grocery stores for an economy-wide rise in the price level. As if Walmart wasn’t greedy during the 2010s when inflation was quiescent, and suddenly became greedy now, just because.

What actually caused inflation was the big spending by both Trump and Biden, not funded by tax increases. The US federal budget deficit is now over 6 percent of GDP, and is projected to keep ramping up. And the Federal Reserve has been slow to raise interest rates to sterilize various federal spending increases, like the Covid spending packages and the Inflation Reduction Act. These are classic ingredients for inflation.

So, plenty of blame to go around, but it’s mostly in Washington, not individual companies here and there.

Eh, I think this is excusing too much. There’s a lot of territory between “writing blank checks with no oversight and reporting” and “a process so anal, only 7 EV chargers are built nationwide over two years”.

“The wealthy and corporations” have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they’ll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain’t nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).

There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.

(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

It’s more about bureaucratic inefficiency than political opposition. Common story in US infrastructure.

Just like all the other things Biden has done in this conflict, this is merely a symbolic gesture to say “don’t blame us if Israel flattens Rafah”.

The US has already provided huge amounts of unconditional military aid to Israel, and remains committed to continuing to do so. So Israel is free to shuffle around their ample resources internally to reach the same outcome.