There are two big levers the government has to control inflation: monetary policy and fiscal policy.
Monetary policy is where the central bank changes rates. This is effective to a point. It defuses a lot of zero-interest nonsense but the primary idea was to cool the business sector by making borrowing more expensive. Thing is, we don't really do that anymore. We don't borrow a bunch of money to build a factory to make widgets. No, we simply financialize everything. Yes, we have a ton of AI debt now but (IMHO) it's not productive output. The big product and promise of AI is labor displacement. That's going to destroy the economy.
Private equity technically borrows money but usually only temporarily. The target gets bought, restructured, a loan is taken out against the assets to pay back to investors and the corpse is spun out before the debt explodes. The problem? The market seems to be wising up to this bargain and these husks need to be kept on the books longer than desired. PE firms are having to borrow to refinance. That's another house of cards in all of this.
But what really fuels PE and all of this? Real estate. Hoarding land has become the best performing asset.
So the second lever the government has is fiscal policy, specifically taxation. Prior to the pandemic, a lot of companies were afraid to raising prices too much as they'd lose market share. An energy crisis triggered a fundamental change in corporate attitudes to raising prices and we've had a ton of raising prices simply to maintain profits or in anticipation of inflation. Pepsi now is in deep trouble because they've discovered that people don't want to pay $8 for corn chips and Walmart's generic brand is $5 and probably made by the same factory.
In the wake of the pandemic some countries introduced a windfall profits tax. Basically, predatory price-raising should be punished with at least a form of wealth redistribution. These measures were few and far between however.
As an example, because of 2020 energy crisis (caused by Trump) and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Europe has been in a deep energy crisis for years with no end in sight. Many European governments have tried to protect consumers by subsidizing electricity. Well, these energy providers are making record profits. Why aren't they taxing the back end to pay for those subsidies? Instead, we just have a massive wealth transfer from European governments to (often private) utilities and gas producers.
But fiscal policy, particularly in the US, never gets discussed int his way. We could solve so many problems by simply having a 50% corporate tax rate. The standard objection is "they'll move overseas". Well, you can't move land overseas, particularly mines and oil wells. And the IRS is capable of tackling transfer pricing and profit shifting. Well, they would be if they weren't deliberately starved by successive governments. And if all else fails, punish companies for moving overseas with tariffs. That's what they're actually for.
So, back to your question, no, I don't think the theory is sound because we have a malignant tumor at the heart of our economy, which is land-hoarding.
> But what really fuels PE and all of this? Real estate. Hoarding land has become the best performing asset.
Can you elaborate on this please? I find this claim interesting and probably true. But it's not clear how you reached that conclusion.
> because of 2020 energy crisis (caused by Trump)
This is not immediately ringing a bell. Are you referring to the 5-7% drop in energy demand associated with the global pandemic or something else?
Classically this is true with regards to Monetary policy, but didn't this fall to the wayside when they set required deposit rates to 0% in 2020, and haven't implemented appropriately sound measures for an appropriate reserve requirement system (Basel3) thus doing away with fractional reserve to full on money-printing.
My reading of the 1000+pg Basel3 document from BiS seems to point to the weighted risk categories being fundamentally flawed (relating to valuation for those risk weighted categories, not unsurprising given the subjective value of assets), not to mention the indirect business flaws that limit new banks potentially growing the number of GSIBs, leading to concentration of risk through sieving.
AI debt seems to be supercharging the indirect stagflation indicators which started showing up a few years ago.
Most empire's above a certain size inevitably run into internal conflict from land-use issues related to rentseeking and monopoly.