Are we even in a free market anymore?<p>Competition is supposed to bring prices back down but all the industries seem to have monopolized and now they just set the max price people will tolerate before getting rid of the service or product all together.<p>Also known in economics as a profit maximizing monopolist.
Boycott price-gouging companies who are testing market elasticity, especially those selling perishable goods. Support competitors where they exist. Wait for temporary discounts and excess inventory to drive price normalization. The first competitor to leave a pricing cartel wins IF buyers are prepared to wait.
A less nefarious reason behind companies increasing profit margins, is that with more uncertainty -- i.e. <i>potential</i> supply chain disruptions in the future -- companies feel the need to make more from what they are able to get to the end consumer/customer.<p>Generally speaking, there's a lot more that can go wrong than go right in terms of getting stuff to people especially from overseas. (True anywhere in the world.) And the specter of uncertainty basically elevates the default cost of doing business for everything.
I hope all the people pedantically explaining to me in the Intel thread this morning that corporations exist to make profits realize the pathetic scope of that statement of fact.<p>If there is such a thing as a profit-price spiral, I hope it gets the same H-bomb Volcker treatment wage-price spirals do.
Does anybody have a link to that effect a French economist figured out after the revolution where printed money doesn't get distributed equally in the economy?<p>I vaguely remember it from my uni economics courses, but blasted if I can remember who discovered it.
This is a joke. Inflation makes costs prediction more difficult and companies are, correctly, adjusting for future inflation and uncertainty.<p>Inflation is here to stay, people.
if people didn't have excess cash then companies wouldn't have excess profits from raising prices<p>am I missing something about why people want it to be one or the other?
So what? Buy from the other guy if you don't like it. If there is no other guy, then we need the FTC to take action. Nearly everything I use daily has a cheaper or generic version.<p>But to be fair, I personally I don't think the FTC is aggressive enough. The FTC seemed to fall asleep during the 2008-2016 giant tech merger era. How Google/Youtube is a thing and Facebook/Instagram is a thing these days blows my mind.