Economists discuss inflation and the economy at the Aspen Ideas Festival — 6/29/22 Watch a discussion on inflation and the economy at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday. The festival is a gathering of some of the most provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers, and other leaders. NBCUniversal News Group is the exclusive media partner for this internationally renowned event. High profile global change agents convene in Aspen, Colorado for this 18th annual gathering exploring ideas and issues that shape our lives and challenge our times. Great panel discussion.
TL;DL The common capitalist "explanation" for this inflation is labor. Labor isn't the cause. Greed is.
Curious how neither the capitalists nor socialists advocate mandatory accounting/finance in the schools. A Swedish socialist high school teacher told me that he objected to mandatory accounting in the schools because the math would make Capitalism seem logical to the students. People who believe in ideologies are a pain. What is the motive of the capitalists? Afraid of the competition?
The problem Marxists/socialists have with accounting is not the math but the definitions. Marxism is based on a large structure of anti-concepts: invalid artificial concepts contrived to prevent use of valid natural concepts. Accounting concept definitions have to be very precise, and are mostly valid natural ones. Once students learn them, it is much harder to get them to accept Marxist anti-concepts. If you know that profit is revenue less expenses, why would you credit a claim that it is the value of labor taken from workers by owners? When their ideologies are false and dishonest, like Marxism. The last thing a capitalist wants is competition! That is why capitalists, just as much as socialists, pretend that the other is the only alternative.
No, because people have always been greedy, but inflation has not always been significant. Large stretches of history have had very low inflation. But people were just as greedy then, so your hypothesis has no explanatory power. Inflation is caused by money creation exceeding economic growth. Apologists for the excesses of finance capitalism claim that inflation is caused by government issuing too much money, but almost all our money is issued by private commercial banks in the course of lending, not by governments. The recent trend of central banks forcing interest rates down to the lowest levels in history has encouraged the super-duper uber-rich to borrow as much as possible from private commercial banks for asset purchases, and all that money was created by the banks that lent it to them (central banks, especially the US Federal Reserve, have also created money to use directly for asset purchases -- called, "adding to the balance sheet" -- kiting their prices). The result was a massive increase in the money supply pouring into asset markets -- stocks, bonds and real estate -- which is where the inflation hit first. Now the money spent on asset purchases is trickling down into the economy of production and consumption, raising consumer prices and wages. That is what is considered problematic. The Fed created trillions to buy corporate stocks when stock prices were near their all-time record highs. It created trillions to buy corporate bonds when bond prices were near their all-time highs. It created trillions to buy mortgage-backed securities from private banks when real estate prices were at all-time highs. It is not possible to understand these actions as anything but a deliberate policy of paying the super-duper uber-rich peak bubble prices for their assets. When increasing the money supply by 30% increases the asset values of the rich by 50%, that's "a booming market"; but when that same increase in the money supply then increases wages by 5%, that's "cost-push inflation."
