cyd

That's a slightly outdated impression. This isn't the China of 1980 or even 2000; they've cleaned up quite a bit.

Eh... after reading that excerpt plus the article, my take home message is that the US is warning Georgia not to side with Moscow against the west.

The idea of prices going up and down by the same amount is based on an equilibrium situation. This isn't ruled out; it could very well be that the high profits of grocery companies is transient (or "transitory" as they say). But in the short run, prices don't move in lockstep.

Aside from market power or collusion, there are other reasons prices could shift more quickly for some sectors than others (even as all prices are going upward). For example, does the industry rely on long term contracts or short term contracts? Is inflation hedging widely available for the goods and services in question? Is the activity more or less sensitive to interest rates?

But these are questions about relative prices. Instead of playing a game of whack a mole, better not to set off inflation in the first place.

There's irony here. Europe went along with the US push to block Chinese access to semiconductors. China turns to domestic chip manufacturing, and the obvious first step is to get into mature nodes, the segment of the semiconductor industry where European firms have been successful. European Commission: shocked Pikachu face.

When an economy undergoes inflation, not all prices rise by the same amount. That's one of the reasons high inflation can be so disruptive. For example, wages (the price of labor) often rise some time after other prices, to the detriment of some wage earners.

It's pretty believable that grocery store chains have acquired enough market power that they're able to pass on all their cost increases to customers, and more, thereby increasing their profit rate. But the fact that individual companies and sectors are well placed to cope with inflation doesn't explain the economy-wide and world-wide inflation.

We can also look at the "companies have market power" explanation using the overall labour share, which measures how much income is going to labor vs capital, economy wide. It doesn't seem to have shifted much during the recent bout of inflation. But again, individual wage earners have seen huge disparities, including some who have been made much worse off by the inflation.

No, interest rate hikes significantly postdated the inflation. Fed started hiking in March 2022, and by that time annualized CPI inflation rate had reached 8 percent. Average over 2021 was 4.7 percent. In any case, interest rates increases are to combat inflation, they are not a cause of inflation

Moreover, wages did go up. US median personal income went from $35.8k in 2020 to $40.5k in 2022. Maybe it didn't go up as much as other prices, but there's nothing that says all prices have to rise by exactly the same amount during an inflationary episode.

Sympathies to whoever it was at the pension fund that had to work with Google's "customer service".

From what I've read, this is mainly a distraction. Russia hasn't committed enough troops for a serious invasion of Kharkiv oblast; their objectives is to tie up Ukraine's reserves and keep them away from the fighting in the east.