Inflation is Your Fault!

Welcome to the Middle Nation, everyone. This is Shaheed Bolson. The plan of the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world for tackling inflation is, to put it simply, to increase unemployment. They call this decreasing demand. Decreasing demand means putting people under such financial strain that they will stop overconsuming.

Because, of course, inflation is caused by the poor and working class having too much money and living too decadent of a lifestyle. There is, they say, too much liquidity in the market. It is therefore necessary to impose mass layoffs, raise mortgage payments, car payments, loan payments, and everything else so that the poor and working class can finally learn financial discipline. And so that all of that excess money that's just floating around can get sucked out of the market. The way to curb inflation, higher prices, is to raise the cost of living across the board.

That's the rationale for the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike of point 75% this week, as well as the scheduled increases over the next six months or so. In summary, inflation is your fault, and now you have to be punished. Never mind the fact that, obviously, people who are working jobs and have mortgage payments are not the ones with excess liquidity. The standard line is that the COVID stimulus packages injected way too much money into the economy, all that excess liquidity they're talking about. But, of course, the tiny slice of the stimulus money that actually went to families and individuals and small businesses, that money was spent on the spot.

The roughly $4,000,000,000,000 that went to banks and major corporations, that's another story. Not to mention that the zero interest borrowing that corporations have been able to enjoy for the last several years has left America's corporate debt at around $10,000,000,000,000. So, yeah, we know who has the liquidity, and there are other ways to suck that money out of the market without harming normal working people. But that's not all. The liquidity issue is only part of what's behind inflation.

As I've mentioned on this channel before, more than half of the increase in the prices of goods is just price gouging. Most of what comprises that extra cost is not due to labor inputs or production costs. It's sheer corporate profit. This is just companies seizing the opportunity to raise prices on the pretext or under the cover of inflation. In other words, at least 53% of any given price hike on goods is actually just corporate profit.

If companies were not profiteering in this way, then the inflation on the price of goods would immediately be reduced more than half, which would put inflation only about one point above the Federal Reserve's target of 3%. Everyone knows this, of course, but somehow we're all supposed to believe that laying off millions of workers, bleeding millions of homeowners over the course of six to nine months as they struggle to cope with the incremental rate hike so that they can keep their homes only to inevitably probably end up losing their homes maybe in the dead of winter and millions of people getting their cars repossessed. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that all of this makes the economy better. Meanwhile, the trillions of dollars that corporations received from the COVID stimulus packages were mostly spent to buy back the shares of their own companies to artificially increase the value of their debt ridden companies. And now those same people are currently crashing the stock market by a massive sell off of their own shares which they bought and artificially pumped up the value in using taxpayer money.

Now they're profiting from that. And in the process of crashing the market, they are decimating mom and pop retail traders who entered the stock market out of sheer desperation during lockdowns. And, yes, about those debt ridden companies, how do you think they're going to cope with increased interest rates? The safe prediction would be higher prices and fewer employees. And, of course, all of those foreclosed homes are gonna get snapped up by BlackRock, which is already the largest private owner of residential properties in America.

It's going to become basically America's landlord. Higher interest rates, if you think about it, are almost like a domestically imposed sanctions regime, just like what The US is doing with Russia. Everyone knows that sanctions just increase the misery and suffering of the population of the targeted country. They don't actually hurt the government. But the theory behind sanctions is that if you increase the misery and suffering of a population, maybe that will incite them to rise up against the regime that you want to see deposed.

It's never worked and it hasn't worked mostly because when sanctions are imposed externally, it actually inspires more of a sense of nationalistic solidarity within that population and they rally behind the ruler or the regime that they feel is being besieged unfairly by enemies. But a domestically imposed regime that is tantamount to sanctions, higher interest rates, is surely expected to have the same effect that is sought to be achieved through sanctions against a foreign country, namely, stirring civil unrest. But of course, the civil unrest in this case is not something that they want to happen, so you can expect that in America and across Europe, they will be taking more and more preemptive steps to secure the power structure against the civil unrest and the discontent that their own policies are fomenting. So there will be increased restrictions on public gatherings, on protest, on freedom of expression. All of this, again, represents the rapid deterioration of the West as a civilization and as a collection of societies, and this is largely due to the acceleration of the transfer of power into the private sector to a national corporations that have no loyalty, that have no patriotism, and that have no connection to any particular nation or sense of national interest.