• Cethin
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    7 months ago

    That’s not how inflation works. Inflation is a measure of costs. That’s it. They track the costs of a whole bunch of products, put into baskets based on category, and measure the price change over time. That’s literally the definition of what inflation is measuring.

    If gas price goes up and everything else stays the same, inflation rises. Same for cars, groceries, consumer electronics, rent, housing, and almost everything else. If the average goes up, that’s inflation. If the average goes down that’s deflation. (It’s more complicated than this, but it’s close enough.)

    Money being printed can cause inflation, because more money in the system makes each dollar less valuable potentially. It isn’t the cause though. Banks can create money without printing any as well for that matter. If they loan out more of their percentage of holdings then that increases the money in the system, but the number of dollar bills stays the same.

    Inflation is not based on the number of dollars. It’s based on how much a dollar can buy. Printing more can make them buy less, but also the cost of goods and services increases equally makes them buy less. This can be caused by an increased drive for profit, like the above comment says.

    • shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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      7 months ago

      Inflation can also be caused by a lack of consumer confidence in the purchasing power of their currency. For example, Argentina and Venezuela, where people will come by at like noon during the workday to get the money from their working person to buy groceries with before it loses its value. You get people in a store whose only job is to walk by items and change prices as inflation ravages the money supply.

      • Cethin
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        7 months ago

        Yep. It’s purely a measure of (the change in) purchasing power. A lot of factors go into that, but printing money is not the only one, nor do I think it is usually a very large contributing factor, though I’m no expert. I don’t think the US is printing a particularly different amount of money currently than normal though, so it’s not really a factor here.