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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

> The COVID fiscal canon blew growth and inflation skyward.

This is not true and has wrongly given credit to people who have said, since 2020, that COVID relief would cause inflation.

Our current inflation is driven by supply chain issues (unrelated to COVID relief) and rising oil (unrelated to COVID relief.)

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From what I've read, our current inflation is due to combo of inflated asset prices causing mortgages and rents to skyrocket along with corporate greed raising prices "because of inflation".

You should probably widen the pool of what you read. You're not wrong (well, corporate greed tends to be a bit of a bogeyman), but it's certainly reductive.

I don't know why you're so confident. All of these things can contribute to inflation.

Probably an adherent of modern monetary theory.

MMT does not say that liberal issue of currency does not cause inflation.

> Our current inflation is driven by supply chain issues (unrelated to COVID relief)

Well, specifically it's because everyone went home and switched from purchasing services to goods. So there are serious composition effects comparing 2019 to 2020 and you don't have to assume you're making less money because an inflation number said you are.

> rising oil

Monthly inflation numbers have been > 5% since May 2021. Oil didn't exceed 2018 $s until will into October 2021.

Working class wages have increased, and that is clearly because of Covid relief. Or other Covid-related policies like halting immigration.

(I should be clear, this is still supply-side, but related to Covid relief. "Stimulus" money spent unproductively by the government is also supply-side.)

Covid relief prevented deflation. Thus when things went back to normal we saw large inflation.

You also had PPP loans which went to businesses that saw growth! And those business owners got huge payouts used to buy houses and assets

This may be the case for many goods (e.g. cars, furniture, dishwashers, beef) - but definitely not assets (e.g. homes, bonds, stocks, art)

Supply chain issues have pushed up construction costs and times.

So buildings increase in value due to supply disruption too.

Asset and good inflation aren't the same kind of thing because you won't die if you can't buy a stock, and you can buy any fraction of a stock not just one share these days. (Although the second one is a reason they've gotten more expensive.)

Homes are a special case, but it's entirely possible for the purchase price of homes to go up while rent doesn't.

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