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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

My memory reaches further than February 2022, and I clearly remember the prices were going up already before then.

What if prices going up in December was due to fed policy / interest rates, but prices going up in March was due to the war in Ukraine?

You can't just assume the price spike in December is the same thing that we're seeing in March or June.

Prices weren't just going up in December, they've been going up since 2020. The asset class boom beginning in 2020 was mostly just a graph of inflation. Trillions of new dollars in the economy, record low interest rates, PPP loans. I don't know if you realize this, but the actual economy wasn't booming then.

The CPI data took years to catch up because consumers are quite price sensitive and detecting and responding to increased demand is a delicate process.

If your memory doesn’t include the global pandemic that shut down global supply chains then I wouldn’t be calling attention to it.

Of course prices went up.

Problem with citing the pandemic is the dissonance that red folk were very against shutting things down for just this reason. Meanwhile resurgence of COVID proved the shutdowns did little on a 5 year timescale

That doesn’t sound like a problem

Folks gained some immunity (and experience in dealing with COVID) since the first few waves.

Plus at best there was a big slowdown, but there was no serious shutdown, many people still worked and got COVID, eg. people who would have otherwise worked at the port. (Though even a serious lockdown doesn't help much. (We saw this in China.)) And mask wearing was so far from ideal that it was not able to seriously decrease the transmission of the disease.

Aaand of course the boosters could have been much much better (containing new variants): https://www.slowboring.com/p/were-getting-an-omicron-optimiz...

What's true is the shut/lock/slow part made no sense after we got the vaccines, and it's also quite obvious that there was just not enough stockpile of basically anything to do a ~1 month lockdown to stop the spread of the disease. (And the moment the first international plane landed it would have started again.)

Yes, of course the prices went up due to frantic actions taken by governments in the course of the pandemic. My point here is simply that blaming the inflation on war is simply trying to shift our attention and absolve themselves of responsibility.

No, it’s just showing that costs are going up because things are harder to produce. Simple as that.

The war on domestic oil production dramatically increased any existing inflation.

> The war on domestic oil production

The way you worded that somehow makes me think you aren't talking about the OPEC+ deal from 2020 that drastically reduced oil supply. Because strangely, not a coincidence, domestic production has been up since that deal expired.

I don't disagree that oil prices drive inflation since almost everything needs transportation, especially in the US where even domestic goods have to travel huge distances. But a "war on domestic production" is not evidence based.

Closest thing that could be serious considered a war was OPEC+, which I understand why Trump did it, prices were plummeting and we wouldn't want the entire sector to crash.

Also, as a reminder, oil prices have already been there (and even higher, briefly), between 2008 and 2014.

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