Not really. Not with the COVID inflation. Over the last few decades sure. But rent and food doubling was corporate greed. We have them on their investor calls bragging about it.
"You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you."--Det. Lester Freamon
I don't think the federal reserve is active outside the US. Also printing money was the cause of inflation when gold was backing the money, now the worth of money is only governed by what you can buy with it. Like you can double the amount in circulation but if no one raises prices there would be no inflation.
FED policies affect every currency on this planet as they are all backed by the usd.. the consumer price index was designed to under report inflation. The basket would be CHEAPER every year because of improvements in production if there was no inflation.
There are a handful of currencies backed by USD but most are not. I only know of
Belize dollar, the Hong Kong dollar and the Dirham as backed by USD, as far as I know those are the only ones.
Do you think stores look at the inflation and raise their prices accordingly or do they raise their prices and inflation is calculated based on that? One of those is correct.
Stores don’t look at inflation, inflation makes the stuff they sell more expensive to buy, so they have to sell it for more money or make losses.
Oh wow, stores must suddenly be buying their materials much cheaper recently when they realized they need to charge less, right?
Or did they just realize the market won't bear what they're charging, so they're lowing their prices to get more business and lower the margin on their sales?
Hint, it's the second one. Because stores are raising prices to increase profits, not to make up for increased ingredient costs.
So what makes the stuff stores buy more expensive? Like you can create a chain of price raising as far as you want but ultimately it's just someone deciding to raise prices and that creating inflation.
Again, only a handful of countries own US debt and I don't even know how US debt interest rates are going to connect to inflation in other countries. Like China and Japan are the largest debt holders and their inflation is vastly different.
Nowhere near as much as price gouging does. The people selling wares decide the price of them regardless of the money supply, which is mostly meaningless in a predominantly digital economy.
The fed affects the interest rate, which has an indirect effect on prices, but the ones actually deciding what to charge for food, rent, or utilities are the final arbiters artificially increasing prices higher than they need to in order to maximize profits.
Their ACTUAL profit margins are significantly larger and growing.
Their gross profits are up because money is worth less because of inflation. The purchasing power of those "growing" profits has basically not changed.
That's just not true. And since this is the point where it's clear that you'll just keep repeating the same piece of misguided conservative orthodoxy over and over again, I'm gonna leave you to it.