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  • Norm_Chumpsky [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    I think this is pretty much accurate. Inflation is basically 100% corporate price gouging, if it was a natural phenomenon the prices of everything would rise at the same time instead of the huge disparities we're seeing between different sectors of the economy. Marxian economist Richard Wolff does a great job of explaining it. I think a lot of leftists are alienated by academic economics, because they only teach free market rules as if they are laws of nature, and therefore might feel less confident debating whether inflation is some magical act of god versus of a conscious policy.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
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    2 years ago

    Michael Roberts is a great (Marxist) economist you should check out! He has a blog and discusses all of this (here but also his book The Next Recession was really insightful for me.

  • chauncey [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    I've been finding Michael Hudson's recent interviews to be helpful on this topic -

    https://michael-hudson.com/2023/04/all-or-nothing-foreign-policy/

    *There are a number of things, for instance, America’s sanctions against Russian oil and food exports. It blocked Russia’s exports of oil and Russian accounted for 40% of the world’s oil trade and an even larger proportion of its gas trade, and much of its agricultural crop trade — grain trade — as well.

    Well, once this oil and gas and food is taken off the market, energy prices have gone up, food prices have gone up, and that’s one major cause.

    Another major factor is the fact that the economy in America and Europe is becoming much more monopolized, and the monopolies have simply been raising their prices, especially the agricultural distribution monopolies that buy from the farmers and sell to the grocery stores and the other big distributors.

    The monopolies, really their costs are not going up very much. But they say, — Well the Fed’s talked so much about inflation being a problem that we’re anticipating that inflation is going to be another 10% next year, so we’re just raising the prices.*