I don't think hyper consumerism goes deeply enough to answer the question of why we saw prices change so rapidly. We printed trillions of dollars and flooded the economy with new money. We had extremely low interest rates, again creating more new money in the system. We stopped student debt payments, meaning people had more money in their pockets to spend. We also stopped evictions, though you would really have to be a special kind of asshole to skip paying rent so you can buy more random consumer goods.
Its worth noting that printing new money was the actual inflation, inflation is a measure of the increase in the money supply itself. Prices did go up, or you could say the dollar lost value, but price changes aren't actually inflation (prices are tracked by indexes).
"Inflation" by itself has come to be synonymous with consumer price inflation. This rubs the Austrian in me the wrong way, but it is what it is. Personally I always make sure to use an additional term like "monetary inflation", "price inflation", and "asset inflation". For example, Trump created trillions of dollars in monetary inflation, succeeding at the goal of creating immediate asset inflation, which then a few years later caused massive price inflation.
Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. It seems like it'd be difficult to narrow down price increases to just one cause, especially a base resource.
It looks like US electricity costs are up around 10% since 2022. How do you peel that apart to know electricity prices changed first, and that that is what caused all other prices to go up?
I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
Also why do you look at electricity? Its not just electricity, its everything. The war disrupted oil supply from Russia, which is something like 11% of global oil production. On top of it they disrupted supply chains globally.
Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover.
This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
I should have said energy there, I didn't mean to zoom in only on electricity. Oil priced are actually a worse comparison, I'm pretty sure oil is down since the war started.
> I mean - you just said it didnt you? Energy touches basically every corner of the economy. Thats perfect. Yeah it does - and so it raises prices for everything.
That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.
> Also, this is on top of the pandemic's economic hangover. This is pretty much up there from the first few searches on this topic, before you have to get into any detailed economic analysis.
Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?
I wouldn't put to much faith in top search results for what its worth. Those are almost never going to include detailed economic analysis. Most people don't click on detailed analysis, search engines won't promote those first.
The direction is inherent to the relationship between energy and other goods. While it’s true that energy has inputs, it’s an input for virtually everything.
>That doesn't show direction though. Energy impacts basically everything in the economy, but energy can also be impacted by the rest of the economy.
What direction? Sorry, direction of prices of energy? Direction of inflation.
Look, we seem to be debating the strangest things. Not only are there 100s of articles that discuss and establish this fact, it is the basis for every strategy to handle the situation.
>Doesn't that go against the earlier comment that prices are tied through energy costs and directly linked to Ukraine?
Yeah you are right. I added it in context of the larger forces driving inflation.
If you want to be focused on energy alone then it is the war on Ukraine. Here - theres a paper from Nature that decomposes the various factors of the price rise and finds that the war was responsible for 75% of the increase in prices.
Its worth noting that printing new money was the actual inflation, inflation is a measure of the increase in the money supply itself. Prices did go up, or you could say the dollar lost value, but price changes aren't actually inflation (prices are tracked by indexes).