I've remarked before that the more you study money and finance, the stranger it all gets. It is a complex phenomenon that eludes understanding, and of course the ruling class takes advantage of this fact. It is easier to plaster over our social and power relations with an obscure layer of money talk: tokens constantly changing hands, changing forms, augmenting and diminishing, circulating and transforming. Keep your eye on the birdie!
But we need to be clear here: at a certain intensity, inflation amounts to rationing. With the general rise in prices, those many goods that require a proportional increase in social resources to attain become more and more out of reach for more and more people. For me personally, there is a vivid subjective experience of the process: struggling to pay simply for food and gas, I look at something like larger medical expenses, or even a used car, or lord help me, housing, and for me it simply can't be done. The resources aren't there for it. Even consumer goods like clothing and electronics begin to appear more and more out of reach: I look at the prices and think, impossible! How does anyone do it? Well, make do and make it last or go without; that is increasingly the mantra for more and more people. A good consumer ethic on a finite planet to be sure! But at the moment beside the point.
Bellyaching aside, I want to look simply at what is happening here. There is a distinct temporal and psychic quality to this contraction, and this rationing. Because if you look at the existing resource base, yes energy supplies and a whole host of other resources are contracting, but the standing reserve of labor and capital is enormous: the unemployed and underemployed, the homeless, the vast stretches of empty or emptying housing stock, the rusting wastes of idled factories and machine, the vast fields of rotting produce and butchered livestock, and so on. We are also talking about a collapse of the political imagination and of a long term sense of any sort of time horizon. The ruling class is out of ideas, but also refuses to cede power and wealth, and so the decision to eat its children and its golden egg laying geese.
With the fear setting in, the last of the trust evaporating, the rest of the social resources, the money, is becoming increasingly concentrated and carefully controlled by limited intelligence. There is a generalized feeding frenzy, in which it becomes more and more universally acceptable to retract previous social contracts, and take with both hands as much as you can grab individually. The contracting resources, the derailing supply chains, the ongoing circulation of damage of the pandemic, those are certainly contributing to the inflation, but what is intensifying all of that and amplifying all of that is the social concentration of resources in the form of monopolies and the relentless driving up of monopoly pricing and asset inflation.
There is a vast and systemic financial engineering taking place, in which the accounting symbols of social resource are manipulated away from the general population, pooling and concentrating among raiders and pirates, in so many words. Yes, all of this sounds quite dismal and dire, but let's take some deep breaths here: there is much more to come.
