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Re:The ballooning money supply may be the key to unlocking i... by jakub_g on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @04:12PM (#24769803)
Can you expand the example with consumer electronics - because it's not clear: who's gouging whom? You mean Big Tech selling expensive smartphones to people who can't buy a house so will buy an iPhone instead?
Re:The ballooning money supply may be the key to unlocking i... by programmertote on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @04:17PM (#24769856)
As someone who tried buying Nintendo Switch, I can confirm that there were scalpers who bought up every Switch stock available during the COVID lock down and resold it for ~1.5x to 2x more than the MSRP price. This seems to have happened with the latest Nvidia graphic cards as well.
Re:The ballooning money supply may be the key to unlocking i... by jakub_g on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @04:21PM (#24769893)
Ah I see. Well same stuff with concert/football tickets, Air Jordans etc. If something is valuable but with limited quantity, this is inevitable.
Re:The ballooning money supply may be the key to unlocking i... by diob on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @04:47PM (#24770129)
You're close here, but I think you're missing the point. Things that haven't been seen as "scarce" in the past are becoming more and more likely to be forced into scarcity. We're not worried about superfluous goods (concerts), but goods like housing / food are not superfluous (one could even argue the same thing about certain electronics).

Other commenters have gone into it, but this is about forced scarcity vs need. Incidentally, it's also similar to why workers have trouble negotiating individually vs as a group.

The gist of it is that those in power / wealth have the ability to outlast any single poor individual. You don't want to buy a house, toilet paper, or a nintendo switch right now? That's fine, I'll keep buying them till you or some other chump gives up. I have so much money that it doesn't really matter how long you decide to be frugal and wait. You want to strike? That's fine, you'll be back soon enough when you need to pay for something or keep your family alive. I have enough to outlast you.

Had we pumped this money into the actual working class economy I wouldn't be worried. But instead we siphoned off more working class dollars under the guise that inflation isn't real. It is, and future generations are going to pay dearly for our naivety.