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Comment by dundarious | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...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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