Americans are too expensive.
As an anecdote example:
* Pre-2021, my house was 160k, with about 10% down, resulting in P&I of about $750.
* Post-2021 (and no significant change since, the same house can probably sell for near $320 (& definitely $290 at the low end). To buy this, you'll need twice the down payment, and even with 10% down, your P&I is now nearly $2000 (due to the higher interest rates and huge principal).
A dollar in 2018 is worth 2.67x more than a dollar today. It's pretty apparent in equities, but also in commodities, and there's no going back to pre-2021 monetary values. "Inflation" may or may not have slowed down, but a lot of people are now stuck until deflation actually occurs or significant salary growth occurs.
Hint: if your analysis does not involve US counterparties, it can only ever be correct by accident.
> You can blame inflation for part of that.
How so? As you acknowledged, number go up internally doesn't mean number doesn't go down relative to other currency, leaving relative expensiveness the same.
- Car companies paywalling hardware and software features while selling data (including GPS location, speed, etc.) to data brokers.
- Netflix raising subscription fees in spite of the fact that they've cancelled so many original shows and lost so much of their leased catalog.
- Grocery stores and fast food restaurants firing cashiers and replacing them with unreliable self-checkout kiosks (pushing the work off onto the customer while continuing to charge them just as much, if not more).
- Wendy's adding "surge pricing" and replacing drive-through workers with an AI that's barely 80% accurate. (So they'll charge you more just because and still fuck up your order.)
There are other examples, these are just the ones that are fresh in my mind right now.
It is called rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
FTA: Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.