Economic inflation has been quite a lot in the news lately, especially in the United States, because of the unprecedented high inflation rates, which started skyrocketing in the beginning of 2022 and reached 9.1% in June of that year, after which it started slowly declining.
The Biden administration has, rather obviously, been denying responsibility and the gravity of the situation ever since, to this day. And, rather egregiously, have been patting themselves on the back and boasting how they got the inflation to come back down, as if that was a great accomplishment. (This even though inflation in the country has been steady at about 3.5%, which is still very high, especially compared to the pre-2022 times, when it was less than 2%, which is the economically healthy amount.)
Many people (even those who don't really care about politics and would just want to live their lives in peace) have been wondering that if inflation is supposed to have come down, how come the price of commodities is still very high, compared to what they were before 2022?
This is where a big misunderstanding about inflation is happening. And this also shows why a big spike in inflation, even if it's very temporary, is a bad thing.
Inflation does not determine the price of products. It determines how those prices change.
0% inflation means that prices of products (on average) don't change. Positive inflation means that products will become more and more expensive over time (in other words, the same amount of money will have less and less purchasing power over time).
Which means that if inflation skyrockets temporarily, and then comes back down to near 0%, it causes a permanent increase in product prices. Inflation coming back down doesn't make prices to come down as well. It only determines how prices change, not what the prices are. In other words, prices will have increased permanently because of the temporary inflation spike.
For prices to come down it would require inflation to go negative. Which is a thing. It's called "deflation". It does happen sometimes (even quite prominently so in some countries at certain points in time), but it's rare, as the free market tries to keep inflation always slightly positive at all times. (I don't know the reasons for this, as I'm not an economist, but apparently there are good non-greedy non-exploitative reasons for it. Apparently prolonged negative inflation, even though it superficially seems to benefit people because their money gains more purchasing power, is bad for the economy in the long run.)
This is the answer to the question of "if inflation has come back down, why is stuff still really expensive?" Inflation having come back down only means that stuff will not become even more expensive. It doesn't make stuff cheaper.
(Note that there are exceptions to this, as inflation affects the price of products quite differently depending on the type of product and what kind of market it's being sold to. Inflation is just an average value, and there can be a lot of variation on the actual price changes of stuff. One good example of something that's largely unaffected by inflation is the price of electricity, which is significantly more affected by supply and demand than inflation. Even at high inflation rates electricity may be completely unaffected and be super-cheap. And vice-versa.)
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