The root of what’s going on here can feel obvious: blame inflation, which picked up in mid-2021 and throughout 2022. But that isn’t really the issue anymore, at least not at the current rate, because inflation is coming down. The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
Did the author of the article check how inflation is calculated? Or just the dictionary definition if basic economics are too complex?
I mean, maybe their argument is that prices are actually going faster than inflation should actually be going?
We do have multiple reports of industries making record high profits despite the inflation.
Greedflation.
Inflation is the rate at which prices are increasing.
They aren’t increasing that much right now. They’ve reached a plateau, the problem is that it’s a high plateau.
Hence, the problem right now is not inflation, the problem is getting used to the “new normal” prices.
Aren’t there lots of different calculations on inflation? Like in the US it’s typically CPI but obviously that’s not applicable everywhere.
You already know the answer.
I’m guessing the basic economics were too complex.
Economics always does jazz hands for the middle part, the part between the macroeconomic money supply and microeconomic prices.
Well… “Why inflation?” is a very different question than, “What is inflation?”
Inflation is a measurement of change in prices, and determined by actually sending shoppers out into the field to check prices on a hypothetical “basket” of consumer goods. So the statement that, “The problem isn’t inflation. It’s prices.” is nonsense.
The text goes on to clarify that prices really aren’t going up like they did during the pandemic, making it clear that the title was clickbait all along.
Your own definition shows it’s not nonsense. If prices are high, but stable, then the problem is no longer inflation.