Not only will there be dramatic inflation, but capitalism will use every manufactured crisis to price gouge the fuck out of everyone, for everything.
Been a very noticeable trend since COVID. Oh the supply, oh the inflation, oh the tariffs …
capitalism will use every manufactured crisis to price gouge the fuck out of everyone
The situation here is that the government is imposing a tax and that it’s getting passed on to consumers. I’m not sure why you’re complaining about “capitalism”. If Acer were part of the government, they’d be charging more too.
You can’t impose a tax and then just have the revenue materialize out of thin air.
But otherwise Acer couldn’t have raised their prices!
Acer can set their prices wherever they feel like. They can double them tomorrow, regardless of whether tariffs show up. What limits their prices is competition, and the fact that consumers will buy from competitors if they do so, not a lack of some event to act as an “excuse to raise prices”.
It’s similar to how “Covid caused us to raise prices!” Sure, initially it would have, but then they saw that watermark and kept bumping it higher, all the while blaming supply chains.
Fast forward to now: Covid is “over,” yet somehow all my groceries still cost much more.
Inflation from the period during COVID-19 did go down. That does not mean that prices will return to a pre-COVID-19 point. Inflation is the rate of increase in prices, not prices. The government will actively aim to avoid deflation via adjusting interest rates, because deflation creates problems. What you saw during COVID-19 was the rate of price increases being higher than the rate of wage increases for several years, and what you saw subsequent to that was the rate of wage increases being higher than the rate of price increases.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/
I think what he is referring to is reports that companies were raising prices higher than the rate of inflation as a way to increase profits. They would then blame inflation even though inflation was lower than the rate that they raised prices.
But what you say depends on what’s causing such prices to rise, doesn’t it?
Let’s say that suddenly the production of product X halts and the prices rise. You’d expect that once you start producing it en masse again, prices of that product would at least fall. But what we see in most of the world is that products didn’t get cheaper once supply chains started working again, arguably because of the phenomenon of price stickiness.
The only saving grace is how good our second hand market is. We Americans are quite spoiled by it. Tho I expect the price increase to follow there too.
Duplicate of https://feddit.nl/post/28948680
