As Phil points out, there’s no aisle in the grocery store where shoppers can escape inflation.
Early on, inflation in meat outpaced other categories, leading the Biden administration to speak of the “greed of meat conglomerates.” If only they were less greedy, the prices would go down, Biden wanted you to believe.
Okay, but look at Phil’s chart. What’s the explanation for eggs, milk, coffee, oranges, flour, rice, cereal, peanut butter, lettuce, and bread? Are all those industries controlled by greedy conglomerates, too, who just happened to start raising their prices at the exact same time after the Fed expanded the money supply and government spending went through the roof?
In a statement today, Biden has moved on to blaming ocean carriers and energy companies. But container prices have declined significantly in the past two months, and nobody seriously believes the energy industry — with about 9,000 independent oil-and-gas producers developing 91 percent of the country’s oil wells — is uncompetitive.
The idea that inflation was the result of monopolization and insufficient antitrust enforcement was always nonsense, as I have mentioned many times before. Now, there’s not even circumstantial evidence to back up the demagoguery.