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this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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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.
There’s actually quite a bit of evidence that post-pandemic price fixing across multiple sectors is to blame for the “inflation” we’re seeing - one example is the energy sector and what the FTC recently reported on: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused
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?
Because they had unlimited money with low interest rates, which made them do mergers and acquisitions, consolidating the playing field further and further so that when the free money dried up, the market was so concentrated on the supply side, they could ratchet up prices this much. This happened in pretty much all markets, not just the US food market.
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?
No, they attained market concentration in enough markets in enough countries to drive the rest, and to varying but overall high degrees. What happened at the same time were the interest rate hikes.
If a money supply hike was enough to cause this, and there were decent natural competitive restraints on price fixing, wages would have went up together with prices.
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.
What if isn't inflation but they're hiding behind that narrative as a reason to keep raising prices. Not saying that's 100% what happens but we got a whole lot of companies out there claiming there's nothing they can do about the price hikes while also reporting record profits (after adjusting for inflation). The maths ain't mathing.
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.
Because people tend to notice when one price goes up. They notice much less when there are multiple excuses and many prices are going up. It's a lot easier to refuse to buy one thing than it is to refuse to buy everything.
We don't have the kind of supply/demand price curve you read about in econ 101 because there are too many barriers to entry to starting any business. Once you're established, you can either choose to race to the bottom so that both you and your competitors lose money OR you can implicitly agree to set your prices about the same as theirs. So choose, do you like more money or less money?
Yes, it's partly inflation. And it's partly the PPP. But largely it's just greed hidden behind excuses with no real threat of PR fallout.
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.
You're apparently spamming similar replies without reading what you're replying to.
Can you use changes in monetary policy to explain why grocery store profits are higher than before? I would think that in the event of inflation stores would stabilize to profits that are roughly the same (percentage wise) as they were prior to the inflation occurring. To the best of my knowledge, this has not happened.
This is the first article I found, and in it they don't mention any economic policy as a major cause.
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.
But why are the prices of food rising faster than the costs paid by companies (this is inclusive of all costs)? The naive assumption is that if all costs were originally x and prices were 1.1x, then as costs become 1.3x, prices become 1.1*1.3x. However, their profit margins as a percentage rose. So instead of 1.1 we now have 1.4.
Obviously the numbers used are fake, but this is why people are angry and it's not something I've seen explained using economic principles that don't involve terms like market consolidation at best or collusion at worst on any article. Rage sells so telling people their groceries cost more because there aren't enough grocers or the grocers are collaborating is good business for newspapers as long as they can find an expert or group to make the allegations for them.
The idea of prices going up and down by the same amount is based on an equilibrium situation. This isn't ruled out; it could very well be that the high profits of grocery companies is transient (or "transitory" as they say). But in the short run, prices don't move in lockstep.
Aside from market power or collusion, there are other reasons prices could shift more quickly for some sectors than others (even as all prices are going upward). For example, does the industry rely on long term contracts or short term contracts? Is inflation hedging widely available for the goods and services in question? Is the activity more or less sensitive to interest rates?
But these are questions about relative prices. Instead of playing a game of whack a mole, better not to set off inflation in the first place.