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Antiwork

The great resignation is all about inflation and wages, nothing else

I predicted that we were going to have massive inflation back as far as 2012, when we realised that the government's solution to the financial crisis was Quantitative Easing (which is code for printing lots of money). The government was able to find a few academics (in truth, not well known economists blinded by ambition) that were prepared to stake their lowly reputations on endorsing the 'fine to print money with no risk of inflation' narrative. This meant basically no restrictions on money printing, and hence inflation was just down the pipeline. The first signs of inflation are not price rises…the first signs of inflation are shortages. This shows up in all commodity classes except things for which demand has fallen dramatically (a good example would be office space, right now there is so much WFH that there is simply no shortage of office space). It's important to remember that…


I predicted that we were going to have massive inflation back as far as 2012, when we realised that the government's solution to the financial crisis was Quantitative Easing (which is code for printing lots of money).

The government was able to find a few academics (in truth, not well known economists blinded by ambition) that were prepared to stake their lowly reputations on endorsing the 'fine to print money with no risk of inflation' narrative. This meant basically no restrictions on money printing, and hence inflation was just down the pipeline.

The first signs of inflation are not price rises…the first signs of inflation are shortages. This shows up in all commodity classes except things for which demand has fallen dramatically (a good example would be office space, right now there is so much WFH that there is simply no shortage of office space).

It's important to remember that labour is a commodity. And because of 'sticky prices' the price of labour has not risen quickly enough to compensate workers for the 'reduction' in wages that inflation was caused.

The mainstream media commentators, the liberal media and the average corporates etc, simply have yet to realise that the Great Resignation is all down to inflation – workers are simply not being paid the going rate, so they are less interested in taking work.

The thing about inflation is that it masks the decline in prices. For example, 7 years go by and the price of labour has 'remained static'? That means that is fallen quite a bit in real terms (the only correct way to measure it).

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