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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Hello! Urea fertilizer has jumped from $400/ton to $1100/ton in a year. This is not consistent with the price jump being caused by inflation, which remains at much more modest rates.

The prices are higher due energy prices rising in Europe and China, natural gas supply disruptions in Texas due to hurricanes and floods, and sanctions on Belarus. They are a driver of inflation, not caused by inflation.

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Inflation is never evenly distributed. That doesn’t dispute the cause for widespread inflation.

Inflation is higher than it’s been in 40 years, and that timeframe includes several energy cost spikes, many of which were worse than the current spike.

For this specific discussion, why focus on inflation (price increases in a broad basket of goods) at all, when it's a specific subset that is causing the issue, and the reasons for price increases in that subset is dominated by specific causation, disconnected from the purported reasons for the broader basket.

Because any fixes for the broader inflation problem would have relatively little effect on this specific subset.

...can you completely discount that rising energy prices may be due to inflationary monetary policy? A higher money supply means more competition for less resources, and if the ultimate resource in nearly every supply chain is energy than it would be sensible to think this could be the starting point of a vicious cycle, rather than sanctions on Belarus or floods in Texas.

To be clear, I don't completely discount it, but I think there are clear and large non-monetary influences that dominate.

We can't completely discount a price rise due to inflationary policy, but we most certainly can discount the portion that's over the 5-7% that most goods have seen — so, like, something like 5% of the increase due to monetary policy, and 270% due to other causes.

Is that ridiculous? Hmm. Maybe try again. We can afford to be generous, after all! Let's say that it's 10% due to monetary policy, and 265% due to other factors.

... Nope, we're still not really there.

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