Supply chains, worker wages and the price of energy has been blamed for the current bout of high inflation. But central bankers around the world are starting to clue in to something consumers have been aware of for a while — corporations just aren’t afraid to raise their prices anymore.
(food companies all raise prices.)
“Well I’m not letting them get away with that, I’ll starve to death, that will teach them!”
(Electric companies raise prices)
“Screw you too! I’ll sit in the heat and darkness!”
(Gas companies raise prices)
“Ha! I’m already used to this from the last 2, I’ll just walk 4 hours to work and live with no heat in the northeast us! No prob!”
Yeah… We “let” this happen… Ffs…
To be fair I skimmed the article and I don’t see the: “we let them sentiment in it” … I think that may be a bit of editorial liberty.
The articles does seem to empathize with us:
You realize we used to own most of those, right? And the public voted for politicians who sold them for next to nothing?
Through cheating and lying. Gerrymandering.
And then some smaller company goes, “wait a sec, you’re telling me I can increase my market share a bunch if I don’t raise prices? Cool, let’s do that. I can make a bunch of money on volume.” And then some other company does the same thing, and so on until they all do. UNLESS an input into that industry has gone up in price and they all have to raise just to stay afloat. Then we’re back to talking about inflation, supply chains, and money supply instead of companies just choosing to raise prices due to greed or something.
UNLESS the smaller set of players and lack of enforcement of toothless regulation allows them or even incentivizes them to engage in collusion and price fixing.