Inflation

When companies see workers making more money, they raise their prices. Happens all the time. Americans have amassed rather large savings over the last two years from not purchasing services and are buying goods instead, stretching the supply chain.

In case you haven't been paying attention (it shows) shareholders earnings reports are done over the phone and everyone listens in and asks questions of the company CEOs. Even reporters are allowed to listen in and they have reported on what they were told.

By law, they have to be honest, and they are rather blunt about how they've made such huge profits: they raised the costs and saw no resistance so they kept on raising them and say they will continue to do so until the public has had enough. Read a newspaper or watch some reputable source of news, instead of getting the skinny from a Walmart employee.

Keep in mind that when a company raises the price of something due to their having to pay more for it, the net profit margins would not reflect it if the price increase were equal to their cost of procuring it. Companies are experiencing huge net profits over and above what would account for that. Just take a look at their earnings. It's publicly available.

Add in monopolies and all the mergers resulting in loss of competition and price fixing/gouging becomes a feature and not a bug. 

As for the price of oil, of course it's behind everything. Oil is fungible and Russia's latest antics have raised it about $30 higher than it would have been to around $96/barrel and it's predicted to hit $120 which they will heavily profit by. Anyone in the WH can't be blamed for that so stop with the rants. In fact, history shows that unless you have some bonehead in office (like TFG), a president is not responsible for inflation, but is a victim of it, like the rest of us. Biden could rescind Rump's stupid tariff on Chinese goods (which was passed onto us-talk about an idiot) but the other side would say he gave them a gift when, in fact, it would lower the costs to consumers.  But the public is an uneducated and fickle lot there's that.

Imagine if we were not dependent on other nations for our energy.

All the best,
Nonoise

Bearing in mind that the current Fed head honcho, Jerome Powell, has no formal economics education and was a lawyer by trade. My opinion - he does what he is told to do and say, including the mantra that any inflation was going to be "transitory". Uh huh.

You mean, this guy? Yea, right. When presented with the thought of MMT, he said:

“The idea that deficits don’t matter for countries that can borrow in their own currency I think is just wrong,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, testified before the Senate Banking Committee in February.

Having said that, I wish Janet Yellen was still in charge of the Fed. She was let go by TFG because he thought she was too short and not from central casting.

All the best,
Nonoise

The printing of money doesn't contribute to inflation. It doesn't work that way. When the government increases currency, it simply buys things like savings (which there are tons of) and puts it into circulation. It's been done that way since, forever. 

Did any of you know that 54% of adults between 16 - 74 years old can't read at a 6th grade level? Save those stories of printing money being the cause of inflation for them.

All the best,
Nonoise

Look at all the backseat economists out there (the lurking ones who won't post) pretending to not be political by clumsily being circumspect, getting a post removed that did not violate any conditions and which was a direct response to an idiotic (and political) statement to begin with. That post is still up. Go figure.

You just have to love all the bitching and whining about free speech and the very ones who do so are the first to censor others. But it's all a sort of validation, isn't it?

All the best,
Nonoise

It's just good ol' fashioned price gouging. 
Everybody's doin' it.