Yeah, I wasn’t disagreeing with you. Just adding some detail.
But yeah, if you look at a graph of corporate profits and net worth, it literally exploded during covid and hardly ever slowed down since then. They got a taste for a greater flow of society’s lifeblood, and now they can’t live without it. Returning to pre-covid rates of “growth” would be labeled as “stagnation” and “failure.”
Meanwhile, consumers were/are facing runaway inflation and a ballooning cost of living, workers being laid off by cost-cutting companies, and yet these corporate executives still have the nerve to say “well we need to pinch pennies to stay afloat, we need tax-cuts and simultaneously we also need taxpayer-funded government stimulus/bailouts/subsidies. Inflation isn’t our fault, it’s just a normal part of a working economy, we’re totally not just artificially raising our prices because we can get away with it (don’t talk about deflation though, that’s a dirty word, that would mean we’re in a *gasp* recession). And no, we can’t lower our prices or pay our employees more; that would eat into our profit margins and we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders.”
I wouldnt call this terribly normal. Though in the end the corporations raising prices are the definition of inflation, I’m sure the government would love to raise the money supply and not affect prices, but this isnt the USSR.
I wasn’t saying it is normal. I was saying corpos gaslight us by telling us it’s normal.
According to the classical economic theories they cite (which are honestly pseudoscience), prices are expected to rise and fall in cycles of inflation and deflation, keeping the system more or less stable over time. But they only cite the part that says “inflation is normal” and not the part where it says “and it alternates with periods of deflation.”
So they push their prices higher and higher because “infinite growth,” but any time there’s even a suggestion that prices might come back down, they panic and scream about a recession and they make the government intervene, because deflation would make their stock prices fall and they’d rather just keep screwing everybody over.
It does seem a bit absurd we ever called ourselves Keynesians. Its like we are constantly reliving Irving Fishers debt-deflation theory, and we keep allowing new asset bubbles to form. Though I think governments are equally complicit, because obviously rapid debasement allows a lot of unfunded spending, which are what voters are always pining for.
Yeah, I wasn’t disagreeing with you. Just adding some detail.
But yeah, if you look at a graph of corporate profits and net worth, it literally exploded during covid and hardly ever slowed down since then. They got a taste for a greater flow of society’s lifeblood, and now they can’t live without it. Returning to pre-covid rates of “growth” would be labeled as “stagnation” and “failure.”
Meanwhile, consumers were/are facing runaway inflation and a ballooning cost of living, workers being laid off by cost-cutting companies, and yet these corporate executives still have the nerve to say “well we need to pinch pennies to stay afloat, we need tax-cuts and simultaneously we also need taxpayer-funded government stimulus/bailouts/subsidies. Inflation isn’t our fault, it’s just a normal part of a working economy, we’re totally not just artificially raising our prices because we can get away with it (don’t talk about deflation though, that’s a dirty word, that would mean we’re in a *gasp* recession). And no, we can’t lower our prices or pay our employees more; that would eat into our profit margins and we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders.”
Their profit margins:
https://d1-invdn-com.akamaized.net/content/pic25ddb17638651a9c61a1f9f564472f46.png
I wouldnt call this terribly normal. Though in the end the corporations raising prices are the definition of inflation, I’m sure the government would love to raise the money supply and not affect prices, but this isnt the USSR.
I wasn’t saying it is normal. I was saying corpos gaslight us by telling us it’s normal.
According to the classical economic theories they cite (which are honestly pseudoscience), prices are expected to rise and fall in cycles of inflation and deflation, keeping the system more or less stable over time. But they only cite the part that says “inflation is normal” and not the part where it says “and it alternates with periods of deflation.”
So they push their prices higher and higher because “infinite growth,” but any time there’s even a suggestion that prices might come back down, they panic and scream about a recession and they make the government intervene, because deflation would make their stock prices fall and they’d rather just keep screwing everybody over.
It does seem a bit absurd we ever called ourselves Keynesians. Its like we are constantly reliving Irving Fishers debt-deflation theory, and we keep allowing new asset bubbles to form. Though I think governments are equally complicit, because obviously rapid debasement allows a lot of unfunded spending, which are what voters are always pining for.