I once talked to someone on /r/Canada whose argument for why China’s bad was in part that they “benefited” from the pandemic while other countries did worse. And of course they got upvoted while I got downvoted to hell for providing rational arguments against theirs.
Oh yeah, r/canada is an absolutely terrible place. Being at over a million subscribers it provides a good glimpse into what a lot of Canadians think, and a lot of it is frankly terrifying. It’s a cesspool of racism, ignorance, and sheer stupidity. It’s going to be interesting to see where things go in Canada politically as things continue to unravel economically here.
People in the West think Canada is all maple syrup and apologies. Hell no, we have a massive conservative cesspool just like the rest of the West.
Canada has some amazing PR. Like we found over 4k kids in mass graves and that’s already out of the news cycle.
I;m still angry by how many clergy members and government officials defended those damn concentration camps.
same
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Inflation is the increase of prices. Most economies define a sort of basket to monitor the increase of prices of common goods, which is important for most people who buy them.
The problem I see with inflation personally is that it is effectively used for political goals. The baskets economies monitor are generally geared towards some basic goods, however do notably exclude things like real estate prices or stock prices.
During the last decades the goal or at least effect of policies was to keep price increases, i.e. inflation, of these defined baskets low, while letting real estate and stock prices go to the moon. Through this, labour costs were “stabilised”, i.e. stagnated, while the price for assets that the rich and well-off have skyrocketed.
In summary that means that it is really difficult to use your labour power alone (manifested by your wage) to gain access to those assets whose price increases (real estate, stocks) and therefore you will struggle to “get ahead” unless you had a head start.
It also means that it will be more difficult in the future to get ahead, because the inflation of labour cost is so much less that the inflation of things like real estate and stocks. In the current way of things, in each generation compared to the previous generation, those who have to rely on their labour will be worse of than those who own / inherit.
How does printing notes (issuing more currency) impact inflation?
If there is more money but the same amount of goods, prices will go up as buyers are willing to spend more.
I think this is the conventional wisdom, but has become controversial recently. In recent years, money-printing has increased, but the money just gets hoarded by banks. It never reaches the real economy. People used to think it increased monetary supply, but in fact monetary supply fluctuates based on decisions made by banks, with mysterious causes/motivations, independently of the amount of government bonds created.
It’s all very confusing. I’m confused, but so is everybody else. Except somewhere deep in the banking system are some people who understand it and are manipulating it.
That is true. But think after all these years of money printing, that money is finally spreading around so much that its affecting the prices of everyday products. For example, the helicopter money in the United States contributed to that.
There are also other reasons for inflation. Recently there are supply chain issues, meaning there are less goods, which also means prices go up. And energy prices are rising, which affects the prices of many other products.
We are printing large amounts of money since 2008 with more of less zero impact on CPI. I’m fairly certain that the recent CPI increases can be fully attributed to supply chain issues. If so, then it will likely drop back to previous CPI rates, once the supply chains are up and running again.
I don’t think the “helicopter” money ever inflated anything else other than real estate and stocks.
My understanding is that the large amounts of money that were created ended up inflating the prices for real estate and stocks. This would mean that large parts of the population would never have seen any of this money. However would be good to see if there are studies supporting this.
Money “hoarded” in banks obviously means more money is available for borrowing for things like home loans and other capital investments. This should reflect in inflation if real estate and stocks are included in basket of goods used to gauge inflation.
Confusion is created, per my limited understanding, by omitting variations in prices of things like education and real estate from standard calculations of inflation. Many governments are still issuing separate data for real estate, but layman doesn’t care for that.
