by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
This is why inflation will rip everyone’s faces off: production will continue to stagnate no matter how many trillions the Federal Reserve prints and throws around.
This is how market capitalism is supposed to work: consumers decide (for whatever reason) to buy more toilet paper. This increase in demand strips the shelves of TP and pushes the price up as demand exceeds supply.
In response, capital flows to enterprises that ramp up production of TP to meet this new demand / scarcity of supply. Price returns to equilibrium.
Yea for our wunnerful market capitalism … but oops, this isn’t what actually happens in our economy. What actually happens is less of a happy story. As correspondent A.P. explained in Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering (June 12, 2020), the real money in the American economy isn’t made by increasing production of goods and services or making better quality products; it’s made with debt that funds financial trickery like stock buy-backs.