The M1 money supply increased by ~600% in the last five years, due to no-reserve banking and enormous money printing during covid, and people still act shocked when there's inflation. It's not because of wage growth, it's not because of "late stage capitalism", it's because of basic supply and demand. Nobody wants to address the elephant in the room that all of this is due to the botched response during covid.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

Covid money creation is part of it.

But in Europe inflation is also being driven by high energy prices due to the war in Ukraine.

to a lesser degree though, it was > 6% already at the end of 2021, before the Russian invasion began.

I think you may have linked to the wrong graph — while that graph does have a spike on it, the spike happens when the index was broadened in May 2020 to include savings and money market accounts.

How much is M1 linked to the amount of money that is circulating? If that money is parked and not circulating, it cannot drive inflation.

I could've lived with the COVID printing if the Fed was more careful. There were inflation indications in early 2021 but the Fed used completely nonsense theory of "transitory inflation" which was obviously a lie to nearly every single economist but it somehow went on with it for a whole year.

After the biggest money supply growth in recent history the Fed somehow forgot basic economic concepts and its mandate for a full year. This is simply unbelievable. QE printing was still going on - in massive amounts - while inflation is showing up and the Fed is speaking nonsense about transitory inflation.

This game is rigged. The Fed is malicious, unpredictable and intentionally lying. It doesn't feel like the Fed is doing the best decision, it feels like the Fed is making intentionally unpredictable and even irrational decisions so that insiders, most likely big banks, could get to unravel their investment positions at the expense of the whole economy.

Ok, basic supply and demand says the more supply you have of something the cheaper it should get.

And yet, despite the 600% increase in supply of dollars, the dollar is stronger than ever.

Whether the money supply is responsible for the inflation or not, this is not basic supply and demand. It’s the exact opposite of basic supply and demand.

The dollar is not "stronger than ever" if we're experiencing above-target inflation.

> late-stage capitalism

Fun fact: the phrase "late-stage capitalism" was coined about 30 years before "woke" was used by American folk and blues singer Lead Belly.

On the plus side, while the latter has only recently drifted from a specific meaning into popular flag waving, the latter has always been used by literal communists (e.g. Lenin) as a member of wishful thinking about why this time it will be different, this time capitalism really will come crashing down, this time we can all just be nice to each other and nobody needs to be nailed to anything.

At this rate, a Vogon Construction Fleet is about as likely as capitalism eating itself.

Capitalism is not a synonym for market economy. Capitalism is not the natural state of an economy. Like communism, it is a mode of political economy which emerged relatively recently, and if history is any guide it will be replaced by something else in due time.

What's the difference between capitalism and a market economy?

Capitalism as characterized by permanent firms with private tradeable claims of ownership and separation of ownership from management is around 400 years old.

But other elements, such as a wage labor market and global trade not being dominated by mercantilist states, are more recent. In any case, 400 years is relatively recent in terms of economic history.

If you count history in transaction volume or raw number of transactions, most of it occured after 1900.

> wishful thinking about why this time it will be different, this time capitalism really will come crashing down

Did you like miss the entire financialisation? Today is not like 30 years ago.

The amountof moneu invested in 3rd order financial derivatives dwarfs the amount of money we invest in real physical cool like infrastructure.

The amount of concentration in supply chains has also never been seen in the entire world history- many high tech good like hard disks are only made in 1 or 2 locations in the world.

Finally, crash of current capitalism does not mean we will have communism, we will just have another capitalism that is less retarded. Kind of like how we replaced the gold standard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

> Today is not like 30 years ago.

Same argument applies to someone speaking at the dawn of WW1, the great depression, Roosevelt's New Deal ending laissez-faire, WW2, the cold war, and at the fall of communism.

The first item on that list, WW1, was about 12 years after "end stage capitalism" was coined, while that blues singer singing about "woke" was around the New Deal era.

If some people are getting handouts or bailouts, it's not capitalism.

Capitalism requires an even monetary playing field.

> Capitalism requires an even monetary playing field.

Almost everyone — capitalist, communist, anarchist — believes in an even playing field. Half the disagreement is about what "even" (or "fair") means.

This is also why people throw the exact same criticisms in the opposite direction, at all the attempts at communism over the years: "it's not real communism because $foo, it was really just state-capitalism", which often seems to me to be a criticism of governments taking the "wrong" idea of fairness rather than connecting with the underlying social/economic presumptions backed into The Communist Manifesto.

(Personal opinion: would be nice if someone can take the points that Adam Smith and Karl Marx were observing about human nature, update with John Nash game theory, and make a new economic system that doesn't turn humans into Spherical Socio-Economic Units in a vacuum like Capitalism and Communism both ended up doing: neither money nor community are the be-all and end-all of human motivation).