#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #France, OCL, Courant Alternatif: Economy: The great return of inflation? (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The consumer price index of the I.N.S.E.E. of last April indicates an average
rise in consumer prices of 4.8% over one year, a rise in prices which is
accelerating. Blame it on the war? Partly yes, but only partly. Part of this rise
had started before. ---- You have to try to keep a cool head. Ukraine accounted
for 12-13% of world wheat exports, and half of world sunflower oil exports. But
the wheat does not harvest before July, and the sunflower in August. And in
addition, there are stocks (variable according to the country, but which are
often counted in years). So, there is no shortage at the moment. If the prices
increase, it is because of speculation, because in fact the price of cereals is
decided on the financial markets, partly in Chicago. Yes, the populations of
Third World countries whose wheat is the staple food and which do not produce it
themselves, mainly North Africa and the Middle East, will suffer a lot. But it is
not because we lack wheat. Physically, there is and apparently will be in the
years to come enough wheat to feed everyone. If these populations are very likely
to go hungry, it is because of speculation and the use of the food weapon as a
political weapon. And if wheat is the traditional basis of their diet, it is
because in the past they produced it. They no longer produce it because
colonization and globalization have gone through this. In black Africa and Asia,
wheat is not the basis of the diet. These countries can do without it. However,
the price of other cereals has increased. But to my knowledge, Ukraine is not a
rice or millet producer. Moreover, the last rice harvests have been good. It is
that these cereals have been swept away in the bullish turmoil of speculation.
And in West Africa, the increase in the price of rice and millet probably has
much more to do with the embargo the CADDC has imposed against Mali (which, yes,
is a rice producer). The threats of starvation are very real. But for the moment,
it is not a threat of scarcity, it is the beauty of capitalism that allows us to
starve in the midst of abundance.

With regard to the rise in the price of oil, let us remember that in the long
term, oil and gas should increase, not because of the war, not because of Russia,
but because it is a resource that we will eventually exhaust. And between
inflation and shale gas, I tell you straight away, personally, I choose
inflation. On the other hand, the brutal variations that we have been undergoing
for some time, here again, are the result of speculation. Speculation and
multinationals at Total (16 billion profit in 2021). Because the minimum reserves
of refined oil imposed by law are three months. Therefore, there should be more
than three months between an event that influences the price and the rise at the
pump. This is not really what we observe...

Who says shortages says rising prices. And there are indeed many small shortages
at the moment. These shortages are linked to the international division of labor
and the unprecedented concentration of capital. Almost all production is split
and modularized. The splitting of production means that even the most basic of
products are dependent on the fluidity of world trade. If we have milk, but the
plastic caps of the bottles are out of stock, there will be a shortage of milk.
Its price will increase for consumers (shortage) and will decrease for breeders
(since we can no longer sell their milk). In short, misery for everyone, except
for a few. Modularization is to standardize the elements that make up the
products. It is not necessarily top in terms of quality, climate, etc. but it
makes it possible to make large-scale production of standardized elements
compatible with a wide variety of models of finished products, and therefore to
favor very large companies. For example, Samsung produces 28% of the world's
semiconductors in Korea. If there is a serious health, climate or political
problem there, no more cars, telephones, household appliances (and I forget a lot
of them) nowhere. Capitalism not only destroys the planet, but it doesn't even
seem like the most efficient way to ensure production.
In fact, inflation is going beyond what shortages should cause, and that's
starting to worry economists. Indeed, banks and finance in general do not like
inflation because it eats away at their rents.

The great liberal offensive of the 80s whose consequences we are still paying for
today had found a simple theory. First, inflation is of monetary origin (hence
the name monetarists given to the ultraliberal movement). So what is needed is to
limit the printing of money, to prohibit States from issuing money to finance
themselves (hence the Maastricht Treaty in Europe), to use the interest rate to
limit the credit expansion. It was a good thing, it justified that the banks and
the financial markets gobergement on the public debts, which they did not fail to
do. Secondly, we invented the inflation/salary spiral, which had to be broken.
The idea, this time deviously derived from Keynesian theory, is that when unions
are strong, they get wage increases, and companies then have to raise their
selling prices to catch up, and suddenly new strikes for wage increases and so
on. And we have all been able to observe that in a few decades, this spiral has
been broken. At the origin of the movement of yellow vests, there is the fact
that prices have increased without wages having followed.

In this vision, more credible than the monetarist theory, what is at the origin
of inflation is the struggle between capital and labor for the sharing of added
value. We have all noticed that for quite a few years, the balance of power is
not really in favor of work. The inflation/wage spiral has indeed been broken,
but to the benefit of the inflation/profit spiral. It is the increase in profits
in a world where the competition dear to economists has long since disappeared
that probably best explains inflation. Inflation eats into apparent profits
(dividends, bond interest, etc.). Economists use the term nominal return to
explain that what matters is the real return, i.e. a nominal return from which
inflation has been deducted. And to see the state of the CAC 40, it seems that
the profit/inflation spiral is at full speed, the big bourgeoisie preserves its
rents to the detriment of the standard of living of the population. However, this
cannot last indefinitely.

Sylvia

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