The Fed Wants To Crush Wages So Corporations Can Price Gouge

There are multiple sources of inflation. As a friend once said, one man’s inflation, is another man’s pricing power.

Right now we have a situation where inflation is caused by (non exhaustively):

1. Disruptions to the supply chain.
2. Lots of dead and disabled workers (over a million dead in the US, who knows how many disabled) leading to a tight labor market in some countries.
3. Sanctions on Russia (food, fuel, minerals, which feeds into other things, plus disruption of the dollar hegemony system.)
4. Massive price increases by corporations above their costs, to increase their profits.

I’ve seen estimates of about 50% for corporations simply increasing prices because they can, even though their costs haven’t risen that high.

What does the Fed think should be done about inflation?

Chair Powell keeps mentioning the relationship between the high level of job openings and wage/price inflation,” Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek, wrote in a newsletter on Tuesday. “He’s not talking to investors. He’s talking to corporate America, and his goal is to have companies essentially institute a hiring freeze and end the cycle of paying up for new hires.”…

…“The Fed’s goal is to convince corporate America to enact a short-term hiring freeze, and it will keep raising rates and talking about aggressive monetary policy until that happens,” Colas wrote. “Lower stock prices are his way of convincing C-suites and boards to do that.”

“Chair Powell mentioned the ratio several times at last Wednesday’s press conference,” said Colas, who said job postings need to drop from 11.5 million to around 8 million to get to normalcy.

The only way to get there would be some sort of freeze from companies.

Since 1979 the only type of inflation pressure either the Federal Reserve or legislatures have been willing to recognize is wage-push inflation.  (See HERE for a long explanation of how the Federal reserve crushed wages with wage push inflation measures.)

This is why, for going on 43 years now, workers wages have not kept up with GDP, most people can’t afford to buy a house, rent is thru the roof, and people die due to medical care costs.

But the way to deal with companies increasing prices faster than their costs isn’t to stop employers from hiring, it’s to institute an excess-profits tax, where companies that are making a lot more than they did before the pandemic simply have it taxed away. Granted, that would take legislative action, but the Fed isn’t even calling for it, and the Fed has a powerful bully pulpit.

You could also aggressively act on anti-trust concerns and break companies up so that they have competition: they can raise prices in large part because they are unregulated oligopolies who raise prices in lockstep.

Those are legislative actions, but the Fed is the main regulator of banks and brokerages and could stop loans from being given to firms buying up the housing and rental supply and jacking up prices. It could encourage the government entities which guarantee housing loans to put conditions which disallow rent increases beyond a few percentage points, and not allow large numbers of homes to be owned by corporations.

There are certainly other steps which could be taken, but the point is that the Fed isn’t pushing anything but “don’t hire and don’t give raises”.

In tight labor markets wages should rise. That’s good. If every time there is a tight labor market you squeal about inflation then hammer the economy into the ground to kill wages, of course people’s wages will fall behind, and if that’s substantially the only thing  you ever do to deal with inflation for over 40 years, of course wages will be hammered.

If, at the same time you run policies which cause massive inflation in housing, rent, and medical care (and now food), well then, ordinary people will be screwed because those are things they must have, no matter the cost, so if they can pay they have to.

What the Fed is doing, in other words, is class warfare, the same as everything of significance it has done since 1979. People will die because of this and become homeless.

As for Congress, well, increasing taxes on corporations is unthinkable to them, so I guess people dying and becoming homeless and so on is their preferred outcome.

Might want to go demonstrate at the houses of key Congress members and Fed Reserve members too.

And remember, much of why the labor market is tight is because they let a million people die and probably millions be disabled by not handling Covid, It was noted near the beginning that the Black Death caused an increase in wages and that Covid might do the same.

It has. Now, on top of letting you die, they want you to not get wage increases, so that corporations can make huge profits and the rich can get even richer.

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