[barake]

Over 50% of the increased prices are from producers not just recouping their additional expenses, but also increasing profit margins.

Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition, but generally speaking companies are suspiciously raising prices together. They've taken advantage of the COVID shortage and inflation narratives to squeeze consumers.

https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consum...

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/05/ftc-grocery-prices/

[stackskipton]

>Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition

What competition? Most of them have merged into massive blobs.

[ToucanLoucan]

Corporate consolidation is one of the biggest and least talked about boogeymen of our current era, one which is set to get even worse under Trump's second term. The Biden admin barely, kind of, got anti-trust authorities somewhat working again, and that will be demolished on day 1 of Trump.

Bigger corpos means bigger donations to bigger candidates. The entire system runs on money and nobody's got money to put in like these supercorps. We live in Gerontocracy that is actively building a Corporatocracy to replace it after the Boomers die off entirely and no money will ever go to the working class again.

[wbl]

What do you think inflation is? Demand shoots up, suppliers raise prices or run out, and it takes time for new capacity to be rewarded and created. There's no collusion here.

[tiahura]

Inflation isn't just a fiscal (even though Biden failed on the fiscal side as well) or monetary phenomena, it's psychological - i.e. expectations about future prices.

Because the Biden administration was characteristically incompetent (Remember Treasury Secretary doing interviews saying that inflation was just a short-term blip and not persistent?) inflation started to get out of control. Once that happened, 30+ years of low inflation expectations went out the window. Market psychology changed, and because people now expected prices to rise, they weren't as resistant to individual price changes. This gave producers (along with legit covid supply side issues) breathing room to increase prices.

[yazantapuz]

This. Just have to look at the last twenty years of argentina.