Inflation: Secrets and Lies 3
Why the stories we're told about inflation don't quite add up
If you think about it, the idea that money is "losing it's purchasing power" is an odd way to explain inflation. It's quite common, though. In fact, I have used that exact same terminology in the past myself.
But what it suggests is that there is some mysterious, intrinsic force called "purchasing power" which is inherent to money. Take a dollar out of your wallet (or whatever currency you use). Lay it on down the table. Go ahead. Take a good look at it. Does it have an intrinsic quality called "purchasing power?" It is losing its "purchasing power" right now in front of your eyes? Or is it merely a slip of paper?
That phrasing makes inflation seem like it's the same as radioactive decay—as if it were some intrinsic property inherent to the object itself the way radioactive decay is inherent to elements like plutonium. If you placed that dollar on a table in a locked room and came back a year later, would that dollar have lost its "purchasing power" by virtue of it being in the room? Would it look and feel any different? Could you take an instrument like a Geiger counter and measure its loss of "purchasing power" the same way you could measure the gamma particles being emitted from an element that is undergoing radioactive decay?
I hope the point comes across. The idea of attributing some mysterious force called "purchasing power" to physical units of currency totally obfuscates that fact that purchasing power is not a feature intrinsic to the dollar or any other piece of paper sitting in an empty room (or an electronic database). Rather, it's due to social changes—in other words, all the stuff happening outside the room. And those social changes include businesses raising prices.
The idea that money loses it's "purchasing power" conceals that fact that people are making decisions. People and corporations. They are making decisions to raise their prices. That is what inflation is—businesses and corporations raising prices. That's what is actually happening, not some sort of mysterious loss of "purchasing power." Phrased that way, it has a passive "mistakes were made" quality about it—it's just something that happens, like radiation, out of our control. Nobody is responsible for anything.
Blaming higher costs on the "loss of purchasing power" of the dollar is like explaining a murder by blaming the victim's "loss of living power." It removes agency from anyone or anything else. The victim didn't suffer a loss of living power—she was murdered. And she was murdered BY someone.
Problem 3: Monopoly
Businesses might raise pries for legitimate reasons. In the first part of this series, we saw that diseases, droughts, pests, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and so forth, have devastated crops worldwide, from lettuce to olive oil to sugarcane to cocoa to oranges, and it's only going to get worse and worse due to climate change. Wars and labor shortages are also exacerbating the situation. Clearly, prices have to rise in these instances.
But sometimes businesses and firms take advantage. Take the price of eggs for example. A while back, avian flu devastated the hens that lay eggs. But the middlemen who effectively control most of the egg market used this as an excuse to jack up prices and take excess profits.
How do I know this? Because it was proven in a court of law:
On November 21, 2023, a federal jury in the Northern District of Illinois delivered its verdict finding that the two largest domestic egg producers, Cal-Maine Foods Inc. and Rose Acre Farms Inc., together with two egg-industry trade groups, conspired to reduce supply in order to artificially drive up the price of eggs.
Specifically, the jury found that the conspiracy was effectuated by reducing the American supply of laying hens and by exporting eggs to disfavor the domestic market. Although liability has been established, the same jury will reconvene starting on November 29 to determine the appropriate amount of damages. Notably, this lawsuit was not about egg prices in 2022. Rather, this suit was originally filed way back in 2011.
There Really Was A Corporate Conspiracy To Inflate Egg Prices, And It's Been Proven In Federal Court (Above the Law)
And this was not an isolated case. Back in 2018, battery companies conspired with Walmart to raise the price of batteries for consumers.
According to complaints filed on Friday, Energizer agreed "under pressure from Walmart" to inflate wholesale battery prices for other retailers starting around January 2018, and require those retailers not to undercut Walmart on price. Walmart rivals allegedly risked higher wholesale prices or being cut off by Energizer, the largest U.S. disposable battery maker, if they charged less at checkout than Walmart, the world's largest retailer.
Energizer, Walmart sued for conspiring to raise battery prices (Reuters)
And those are just the cases that have been brought to court, which is a very high bar given the extensive efforts taken by players to hide their activities. Almost certainly the iceberg rule applies here: for what you can see above water, at least 90 percent of it is hidden from view. And isn't it interesting how this stuff is almost never covered by the so-called "liberal" media? Even if they do cover these topics, they are usually buried under other topics like “horse race” politics, celebrity gossip, and culture war outrage bait.
In industry after industry, we've seen a small group of middlemen take over entire markets and use their power to strong-arm suppliers, raise prices, and generally engage in anti-competitive practices which hurt the consumer and cause prices to rise. What's another term for rising prices? Oh, that's right—inflation.
Again, the passive “loss of purchasing power” framing hides the fact that people and firms were making decisions to raise prices—decisions which boosted their profits, both legal and illegal (and it's only illegal if they get caught). Yet, even while all this was happening, and was documented, people were told to blame “excessive government spending” instead.
“Your honor, I didn't kill the victim, she simply suffered a loss of living power. No one can be held responsible for it!”
What is the response of economists to all this? Surely economists—being the "scientists" that we expect to explain to us how the economy works—must be aware of these kinds of activities and try to understand why and when they occur.
Think again. Their response? That all of the above is literally impossible.
I'm not even kidding here. Economic logic says that these kinds of things—despite overwhelming and incontrovertible proof that they occur—simply do not happen. According to economic theory, markets are always competitive and efficient and heading toward "equilibrium" based on the laws of supply and demand. Monopolies, cartels and collusion are impossible. And, even if a monopoly forms, that is simply the market's reward for being “efficient.”
It would be like astronomers refusing to study meteors because their theories say that meteors do not exist. Meanwhile, the average person can look up in the sky and see meteor showers happening on a regular basis. Yet astronomers continued to insist that what people are seeing with their own eyes cannot occur because their theories say so.
Yeah, nice “science” you got there, bro.
Just like they've abrogated their duty to understand the true causes of inflation, economists have abandoned attempts to understand how and why corporations can raise their prices. This is also the result of the switch to neoliberalism staring in the 1970s. Before then, monopolies and oligopolies were treated as a very serious issue. Economists in those bygone days were more preoccupied with making sure the market economy worked well for everyone rather than rationalizing away all of its problems so long as rich people benefited.
And if you are an economist who dares go against the grain, expect to be labeled a traitor and viciously attacked by the collective economics priesthood. Take the case of Isabella Weber.
Problem 4: Seller's Inflation
Isabella Weber is a young German economist working in the United States. Back during the pandemic, she was unsatisfied with the conventional explanations being given for rising inflation. Like everyone else, she was told that inflation was caused by too much government spending. It was caused by the thousand-dollar stimulus checks. It was caused by “government money printing” and borrowing, and that we needed to raise interest rates and cut spending to deal with it.
But there were a number of reasons to doubt this narrative because it didn't quite fit with the data. Sales went way down and costs went up for most firms. Yet, at the same time, these same firms were making record profits and had historically high profit margins. How was this possible?
The U.S. spent a lot on economic relief during the pandemic, but so did other countries, including Japan, where inflation peaked at just 4.3 per cent. If too much government spending were the problem, why weren’t all of the big spenders getting hit similarly hard? And if excessive household wealth were the key driver of inflation, you would expect the prices of consumer goods to rise more or less in tandem, as people bought more of everything. Instead, most inflationary pressure came from large spikes in the prices of specific products and commodities, such as natural gas. Were households devoting every cent of their stimulus checks to higher thermostat settings?
To Weber...[t]he focus ought to be on sellers, not buyers. The pandemic had upended global supply chains, making it harder for corporations to acquire the stuff they needed to make their products. This should have squeezed their profit margins. Instead, as the economy began opening up, corporate profits were wildly outpacing growth in consumer spending power...
Here’s an example. Semiconductor chips are the basic building blocks for electronic equipment. When COVID lockdowns and a string of temporary factory closures led to global shortages, the price of each chip began to rise, as did the price of everything else that used them. This proved especially troubling for the automobile market—a new vehicle can require as many as three thousand chips.
As you’d expect, new cars got more expensive. So did the consumer alternative, used cars, which, in the first six months of 2021, jumped in price by nearly thirty per cent. But Weber argued that carmakers were raising prices far beyond what was necessary to cover the more costly chips. By 2022, the ongoing chip shortage had resulted in the fewest annual sales of new cars in more than a decade. Still, profits were up—car companies posted their best earnings in six years.
In a recent paper, Weber writes that the chip shortage established a “temporary monopoly” that allowed automakers to “raise prices without having to fear a loss in market share.” And it wasn’t just chips. Analyzing transcripts of company earnings calls, Weber concludes that firms in a variety of industries knew they could get away with gouging customers, who were already primed by the chaos of the pandemic to expect price hikes. Crucially, firms weren’t worried about losing customers to competitors; because of the supply bottlenecks, competitors would also be raising prices.
Weber calls this dynamic “sellers’ inflation,” in contrast with the traditional model of inflation, in which an excess of consumer purchasing power is to blame.
What happened when this heretic dared to contradict the received wisdom of economics? Well, what happened to Galileo when he said the earth revolved around the sun?
Weber was pilloried by the high priests of the economics profession, along with the online libertarian consensus. You see, they already knew the Truth—that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. “Corporations have always been greedy,” went the mantra, apparently oblivious of the fact that opportunism exists. It would be like catching a guy engaged in bribery red-handed but dismissing the case against him because, “he's always been dishonest.”
Even more heretical, Weber suggested the possibility of price controls as a way to manage inflation. This is virtually the most heretical belief possible among economists—it’s as if a priest in the Vatican said something sympathetic to atheism. The response, was swift, predictable, and scathing. Fortunately, she was only figuratively burned at the stake by Twitter mobs rather than literally burned at the stake like the heretics of times past.
...without warning, her career began to implode. Just before New Year’s Eve... a short article on inflation that she’d written for the Guardian inexplicably went viral. A business-school professor called it “the worst” take of the year. Random Bitcoin guys called her “stupid.” The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called her “truly stupid.” Conservatives at Fox News, Commentary, and National Review piled on, declaring Weber’s idea “perverse,” “fundamentally unsound,” and “certainly wrong.”...every time Weber checked her phone she was being mocked by a new round of critics. “The ugliness of the reaction to Weber’s op-ed is depressing,” Adam Tooze wrote, in his popular “Chartbook” newsletter. “Depressing and telling.”
In a matter of hours, Weber...had transformed from an obscure but respected academic at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, into the most hated woman in economics—simply for proposing a “serious conversation about strategic price controls.” The uproar was clearly about something much deeper than a policy suggestion. Weber was challenging an article of faith, one that had been emotionally charged during the waning years of the Cold War and rarely disputed in its aftermath.
What if We Were Thinking About Inflation All Wrong (The New Yorker)
This incident is more telling than a million words I could write about the economics profession. As I've said over and over again in the past, and will continue to say over and over again in the future, economics is not a science—it is a religion. In its beliefs, structures and practices, it is more akin to a religious cult—one which reinforces the existing power structure rather than any serious attempt at empirical scientific inquiry. It has its Bible, it's priesthood, its catechism, its doctrine, its prophets and heretics, all of which are self-policed from within. Its God is the Market, and like God, the Market is all-knowing and infallible. Like the Catholic Church of pre-Enlightenment Europe, its word is simply taken as fact, despite tons of evidence that its theories do not square with reality. Yet everyone believes in it. It is a pseudoscience, cloaked in the methodological tools of science such as academic papers, prestigious awards and sophisticated mathematical formalisms, yet its fundamental assumptions are unsound and its inquiry is more dedicated to validating revealed truths rather than understanding reality as we encounter it. It is no more a science than theology or astrology. What more proof do you need?
To make a long story short, just like with Galileo, eventually the data became too significant to ignore. However, Weber aside, most of these investigations were not conducted by mainstream economists who continued to remain hostile to these ideas, much like fundamentalist preachers are resistant to the ideas of Darwinism. Instead, it has been primarily journalists, outsiders, government agencies, and think-tanks—most of which are associated with left-of-center politics—that have continued to document these practices. This article provides a good summary:
Once a fringe theory, "greedflation" gets its due (Axios)
For example, an investigation by the IPPR and Common Wealth think tanks found that:
Profiteering has played a significant role in boosting inflation during 2022...Analysis of the financial accounts of many of the UK’s biggest businesses found that profits far outpaced increases in costs, helping to push up inflation last year to levels not seen since the early 1980s...business profits rose by 30% among UK-listed firms, driven by just 11% of firms that made super-profits based on their ability to push through stellar price increases – often dubbed greedflation. Excessive profits were even larger in the US, where many important sections of the economy are dominated by a few powerful companies.
This surge in profits happened as wage increases largely failed to keep pace with inflation, and workers suffered their largest fall in disposable incomes since the second world war.
Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows (The Guardian)
Likewise, research by the US-based Economic Policy Institute found that:
"In normal times, corporate profits contribute about 13% to prices. Since the second quarter of 2020, they have instead contributed more than a third of price growth, or more than twice as much as they normally do. This contribution was larger in previous quarters, which means the slight decline in mark-ups...has put a small bit of downward pressure on inflation in recent quarters. But there remains a long way to go before profits are back to normal.
Even with today’s slowdown, profit growth remains a big driver of inflation in recent years (Economic Policy Institute)
And the Groundwork Collaborate found that over half of inflation in 2023 was driven by corporate profits, far in excess of previous inflationary periods:
As corporations have lamented supply chain woes and higher labor costs over the past two years, their profits have skyrocketed, fueling inflation and exacerbating a longstanding affordability crisis.
While labor and nonlabor input costs have played a role in price increases, corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than one-third since the start of the pandemic. Comparatively, over the 40 years prior to the pandemic, they drove just 11 percent of price growth.
Corporate profits as a share of national income has skyrocketed by 29 percent since the start of the pandemic. While our economy has returned to or surpassed its pre-pandemic levels on many indicators, workers’ share of corporate income has still not recovered.
Inflation Revelation: How Outsized Corporate Profits Drive Rising Costs (The Groundwork Collaborative)
The Federal Trade Commission found a similar thing in grocery stores, another industry which as been undergoing rampant consolidation. In 2022 alone, American consumers saw the largest annual increase in grocery prices—nearly 12 percent —since 1978.
The Federal Trade Commission today issued a report on the causes behind grocery supply chain disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The report revealed that large market participants accelerated and distorted the negative effects associated with supply chain disruptions.
And, once again, high energy costs—which drives up the cost of just about everything else—appear to have been the result of collusion in the oil industry which may have been responsible for almost a third of inflation in 2021:
Even the European Central Bank and the Bank of England have had to reluctantly acknowledge that corporate profit-taking is a significant driver of inflation, although raising interest rates is still their preferred method of dealing with it.
Data articulated in more than two dozen slides presented to the 26 policymakers showed that company profit margins have been increasing rather than shrinking, as might be expected when input costs rise so sharply, the sources told Reuters. An ECB spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
If you think about it, it makes sense why this can happen. Most people don't realize that the inflation rate is an average across a basket of goods. So, even if your costs haven't gone up as much as the headline rate, you can still jack up your prices up to that number and no one will question it, because if the public constantly hears that "inflation is seven percent," or whatever, then they will expect to pay higher costs for everything, whether or not your particular industry is affected. So why wouldn't you take advantage of this if you could?
Corporations have always been greedy!
Where is the mainstream media in all this? Why aren't these front-page headlines? Why do we instead see headlines like the CNN one, above? You really have to dig and look at alternative media, like I have done here, to find this information. This may be one reason why the mainstream media is pushing culture war topics with even more gusto than usual.
Yet, despite all of this mounting evidence, there seems to be a strange disconnect among the general public. If you go into any online discussion, what do people still blame for inflation, even this many years later?
"Government money printing."
And you'll find that this opinion is invulnerable to any amount of facts or evidence, meaning that, it too amounts to a religious belief.
Problem 5: Price Fixing
Not only are firms jacking up their prices using inflation as an excuse, but there is evidence that firms are colluding across entire sectors of the economy to keep prices high.
One of the most controversial issues in the US right now is the sky-high cost of shelter.
The tactics that the media, economists, and other online influence-shapers use is very similar to the discussion surrounding inflation. They will pick one specific cause, which does play some role in the phenomenon, and insist that it the ONLY cause, and then use that to dissemble or obfuscate alternative explanations—explanations which would might make the ruling class look complicit. In the case of inflation it is the money supply. In the case of housing, it is the housing supply.
There is simply a shortage of housing, goes the explanation. The reason is because of too much regulation and too much agency given to people to oppose new construction—known as NIMBYs (not in my backyard). These mysterious, all-powerful, and ever-present entities, the thinking goes, are alone responsible for rising housing costs across the world. The solution, then, is simple—get rid of all regulations, take decision-making power away from citizens, and the invisible hand of the free market will solve the housing crisis on its own through a sort of "trickle-down" effect for houses and apartments.
However, what this explanation obscures is that there is abundant evidence that landlords across the United States have been engaging in price-fixing in recent years. They have gained this ability through a software package called RealPage which allows them to coordinate with other landlords across the country to keep rental prices elevated. You can't play landlords against each other to lower prices if they have all the same information and know what the others are doing. Not only that, but similar software packages have cropped up across a wide variety of industries, including agricultural commodities (known as Agri Stats).
Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why. (ProPublica)
Basically, the much-vaunted “information economy” has led to businesses gaining massive amounts of data about the rest of us peasants and using it to raise prices, corner markets, and generally rip us all off. And it's just getting started. “Surveillance pricing” and “surge pricing” are being adopted by companies at the same time as price tags are being swapped out for digital displays, meaning that prices will be adjusted nanosecond by nanosecond in order to squeeze the maximum amount of money possible out of us.
Pluralistic: Surveillance pricing (05 Jun 2024)
This is made worse due to industry consolidation where all of the competition is bought up by one big player who can then control virtually the entire market. In sector after sector, the number of players in the industry can be counted on one hand with fingers left over, making the idea of “competition” absurd. This has caused the money flowing to people at the top to skyrocket while the rest of us end up paying higher prices. Remind me again, what's another term for paying higher prices?
You would think economists would be interested in studying this phenomenon, but once again, you would be wrong. Mavericks like Weber aside, most mainstream economists insist that all of this is impossible and can't be happening. Markets are perfectly competitive, cartels are impossible, collusion can't happen, monopolies—even if they do exist—are beneficial, and prices always head toward equilibrium. That is the belief of economists. When the real world contradicts the theory, it is clearly the theory which is correct and real world that is wrong according to economists.
Instead, these practices been uncovered by a number of independent journalists willing to go against the grain. “Left-leaning” media outlets tend to be more sympathetic to these ideas, which is interesting. There has been terrific reporting on this by outlets like ProPublica, journalists like David Dayen at The American Prospect, and Matt Stoller’s BIG newsletter. The American Prospect recently devoted an entire issue to this topic, and it is worth reading and supporting their work if you can. From the issue:
The Fed’s outdated theories have obvious limitations in an age of monopolistic concentration, low taxation, and high-powered algorithms. As corporate America’s pandemic profiteering spree demonstrates, pricing is often a function of power, not demand. And the Fed’s principal tool—tinkering with interest rates—is woefully inadequate to deal with the market muscle that inevitably leads to predatory pricing.
When corporations are too powerful, they will use that power to strong-arm both American workers and consumers. That’s particularly true when they can capture so much data about their customers, and use so many high-tech tricks and traps to get them to pay more.
The Fed can’t implement price controls, break up big corporations, or sue companies for anti-competitive practices. The Fed cannot control algorithms used by corporate landlords to drive up rent prices, or force the largest credit card issuers to stop collecting predatory junk fees. Yet all of these are imperative components of a strategy to combat predatory pricing. The Fed has a single blunt tool—interest rates—that scapegoats workers and makes them poorer. And in this era of pricing, it doesn’t really work that well.
Taming the Pricing Beast (The American Prospect)
These heroic reporters have also illuminated how "junk fees" are tacked on to all sorts of things now—fees which have nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of providing the good or service in question and consumers have no choice but to pay. These junk fees are just outright fleecing and are becoming endemic to nearly every industry, which is also causing consumer costs to rise. Remind me again, what's another term for rising costs?
Suburban is a particularly egregious purveyor of junk-fees, but there's only a difference of degree between Suburban's fees and the fees charged by your landlord, hotel, bank, cable operator, ticket seller, restaurant, nightclub, food delivery app, ride-hailing app or assisted living facility – or airline.
Indeed, airlines are the cradle of junk-fees, the business that figured out how to extract 100 percent margins on "extras" that don't cost them anything to provide, like seat selection. The Big Four airlines pull down $8.3 billion/year on junk-fees, and it's all thanks to one fella: Jay Sorensen, founder of Ideaworkscompany, a consultancy that teaches airlines how to rip us off.
Pluralistic: The airlines were patient zero in the junk-fee plague (07 Jun 2024)
All of these shady business shenanigans are ignored in the drive to hike interest rates to deal with inflation which—let me remind you—drives up the incomes of the investor class and theoretically puts labor on the back foot. What is raising interest rates going to do about any of this? If anything, it will reduce the ability of the average consumer to pay these elevated and extortionate costs. Raising interest rates will make construction more expensive, which will reduce the number of housing units, causing prices to rise. Higher mortgage rates have exacerbated the shortage of housing, because people are holding on to supply. Higher interest rates will dry up business investment, reducing the ability for supply to catch up with demand. It has already resulted in cancelling several clean energy projects. It has caused the costs of servicing the national debt to explode. Yet, we’re told that this is the only way to deal with inflation, because inflation is always and everywhere the result of “too much money.”
Another Bogus Explanation
Because most people's entire economics education since the 1990s seems to have come from libertarian Web sites, there is another idiotic idea is floating around that needs to be debunked before we move on. It is the idea that the US Federal Reserve is solely responsible for inflation across the entire world.
Libertarians have an odd fixation with the Federal Reserve. Because they believe that the "free market" is perfect and can’t ever produce undesirable outcomes, they need to have a scapegoat to blame whenever reality doesn't conform to their theories, and that scapegoat is always the government in some form. Because libertarians have a massive online presence, they are able to convert a lot of people to their quack theories which sound plausible on the surface but fall apart on further inspection.
The truth is that a strong dollar is inflationary. If your domestic currency, the quatloo, is 100 to the dollar, and then it goes to 200 to the dollar (i.e. it weakens against the dollar), you have to exchange a lot more quatloos to get your hands on US dollars. And you need to get your hands on US dollars, especially if you are a net importer, because most commodities in global markets are priced in US dollars, meaning that the seller expects to be paid in US dollars. To get those dollars, then, you need to raise your prices domestically in order to secure enough dollars to purchase items from abroad.
However, where the libertarian story breaks down is that they also insist that inflation is being caused by "debasing" the dollar via "government money printing." It is obvious that a strong dollar and one that is being "debased" are mutually exclusive. These people want to simultaneously argue that the US dollar is both being thoroughly mismanaged AND causing global inflation—a logical impossibility. In fact, a strong dollar would cause US imports to be cheaper, tamping domestic inflation. This New York Times article does a good job explaining what the reality is behind exchange rates and their effect on inflation:
The dollar is on one side of nearly 90 percent of all foreign exchange transactions. A strengthening U.S. currency intensifies inflation abroad, as countries need to swap more of their own currencies for the same amount of dollar-denominated goods, which include imports from the United States as well as globally traded commodities, like oil, often priced in dollars. Countries that have borrowed in dollars also face higher interest bills.
There can be benefits for some foreign businesses, however. A strong dollar benefits exporters that sell to the United States, as Americans can afford to buy more foreign goods and services (including cheaper vacations). That puts American companies that sell abroad at a disadvantage, since their goods appear more expensive, and could widen the U.S. trade deficit at a time when President Biden is promoting more domestic industry.
Exactly how these positives and negatives shake out depends on why the dollar is stronger, and that depends on the reason U.S. interests rates might remain high.
A Strong U.S. Dollar Weighs on the World (New York Times)
Plus, in the real world, the US dollar is both strengthening and weakening against various currencies all the time. The idea that the Federal Reserve can single-handedly cause inflation across the entire planet for years is patently absurd. Even mainstream economists, as corrupt and incompetent as they are, do not take this idea seriously. So, if you hear this argument being promoted online, it is utter nonsense, and the people making it are either idiots or libertarians. But I repeat myself.
One other dissenting economist is Mark Blyth of Brown University. Because he considers himself to be a "political economist," Blyth sits somewhere outside the mainstream economics profession which allows him to buck the conventional wisdom. Blyth is currently working on a book about inflation. While that book is not out yet, he recently gave a talk on the book’s contents which was very illuminating and cuts through a lot of the bullshit we are fed about inflation in the media and online. In the final post of this series (because I'm sick of writing about this), we'll take a look at his talk.
Loving this series.
Here are some typos I found:
"It would by like astronomers"
"willing to against the grain"