By Daniel Lacalle – Mises Wire
The government tries to blame inflation on anything and everything except the insane fiscal and monetary policy of the past years. There is no such thing as commodity inflation, corporate greedflation, cost-push inflation, or shrinkflation. The only thing that can make aggregate prices rise in unison, consolidate the increase, and continue rising even if it is at a slower pace is the destruction of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar through the monetary mismanagement caused by monetizing an unsustainable and ever-increasing public deficit. If any of the aforementioned factors had contributed to inflation, we would currently be experiencing deflation rather than persistent inflation, which only refers to a slower rate of price increases. Inflation is always the destruction of the purchasing power of the currency and that is what Americans received when they were promised free things: lower real wages and a diminishing purchasing power of deposit savings.