Two Bloomberg Opinion columnists claimed that American consumers and corporate greed are responsible for Biden’s inflation—because Americans have been “too accepting” of growing prices. In what world do they live?
Bloomberg Opinion columnists Chris Bryant and Andrea Felsted let their willful ignorance show when they called on U.S. consumers to get off their couches and protest consumer price increases. After all, it’s their allowance of corporate greed — not massive government spending — that is responsible for inflation. “When inflation took off in the 1960s, people didn’t just grumble about rising prices — they protested in front of local stores,” the Bloomberg authors wrote. “It’s time this generation of consumers push back harder against unnecessary price increases.”
Numerous economists have warned that inflation is caused by government spending, not by corporations. “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. That’s one of the iron rules of economics,” renowned economist and author Stephen Moore told MRC Business. “If inflation is promoted by corporate greed then why is it that the two industries that have had the highest inflation rates are in health care and education that are dominated by government and nonprofit institutions?”
Bryant and Felsted argued that pricing protests today “might help avoid more destructive interest rate hikes.” They added that “Happily, the anti-inflation movement seems to be gaining steam.”
The list of figures in the Bloomberg Opinion writers’ so-called “anti-inflation movement” included UBS economist Paul Donovan and Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, both of whom have called on consumers to protest what they called corporate greed. Corporate greed, the authors claimed, is also the causing effect of inflation in 2023, echoing a leftist talking point pushed by the legacy media and the Biden administration.
“Consumers have been conditioned to accept excessive prices increases by a torrent of bad news and economic shocks — first the pandemic, then supply chain upheaval, and more recently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring energy price,” Bryant and Felsted claimed. “It began to seem plausible that the price of everything should increase a lot.”
The authors glossed over the fact that the 1966 “Housewives’ Revolt” did not actually decrease inflation, but suggested today’s consumers have a more powerful tool. “The women-led grocery store boycotts of the 1960s in the US were ultimately unsuccessful, and inflation was only stamped out years later by the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to punishing levels,” Bryant and Feksted admitted. “But today’s consumers have a far more effective tool than placards — social media.”
Bloomberg’s Opinion writers, however, are apparently encouraging its readers to think that everyone just got used to rising prices. “The corporate spin was that consumers just loved their brands,” the columnist continued. “Companies are discovering their pricing power has limits and that being too greedy can hurt their brands.”
Who could’ve imagined that the solution to one of the nation’s worst inflation periods in recent memory was just protesting? If that were true why haven’t we been protesting gradually rising prices for the last six decades?
