Comment on Isn't Greedflatiin just inflation with different people profitting?
Alimentar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Inflation is the devaluation of the currency. The definition has been muddied for a time now but ultimately inflation refers to the expansion of the money supply.
As people borrow more and governments print more, prices would increase. Not because those items have more value but because the money has lost its value needing more of it to pay for the same stuff.
If tomorrow everyone’s wages would double. Prices would double as demand would increase as the market balances itself out.
Greedflation is a term that shifts that narrative. You could argue that yes there are bad actors for sure. But the term greedflation is redefining inflation, making you focus more on corporations instead of the main contributor, an expanding money supply.
drphungky@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A quibble only because it’s what I do professionally, but that’s not really how people other than macroeconomists concerned with the money supply talk about inflation. It’s usually used as shorthand for the price change for a given standard of living. The importance of that matters quite a lot when you start talking about relative inflation between goods and services. We can very clearly say that textbooks have had massive price inflation in the last 20 years, and that has nothing to do with the money supply, it’s because they are way more expensive than they used to be relative to other goods. Another reason it matters is comparison across regions. If prices are rising faster in Asheville, NC than NYC because it’s a metro transitioning from being cheap to kind of expensive, it doesn’t make good economic sense to say that currency is being devalued at a faster rate in NC. What is actually happening is that prices are rising faster there, again, relative to the rate of change somewhere else.
Alimentar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I guess it depends on how you define inflation. To me and what I’ve been reading, inflation is the ratio between goods and services and the money supply. Inflation isn’t rising prices. Price raising is a symptom of inflation. But I know you know that. I just don’t think it’s beneficial to use inflation interchangeably with supply and demand and price raises, it just creates confusion. I very much favor the macroeconomics view of inflation because through that lens a lot things start making sense.
Since this is your field, obviously you’d know that if you have more goods, you get deflation. And funnily enough when you look up the definition of deflation it’s very strongly tied to that ratio between goods and services and the money supply.
I just feel that over time people have changed the definition of inflation. It’s no surprise that the term Greedflation has popped up because the topic surrounding it has been convoluted, confusing a lot of people.