Eggs are again steadily rising in price. Wal-Mart “great value” prices isn’t all that ‘great’ to begin with, with most of it’s products.
But can we stop calling things inflation? Call it for what it really has been - G-R-E-E-D
Must be an election year
The problem is the way the system is rigged.
Kroger is a publicly traded company, their stock price right now is 46.71 / share.
You can see their most recent earnings report here:
Operating Profit of $912 million; EPS of $0.88
Now then… for NEXT quarter… It doesn’t matter if they are profitable or not. Because they are publicly traded, they are going to be expected to make MORE profit than they did this quarter.
Let’s say next quarter they “only” have $890 million in profit… Most of us would KILL to be that profitable.
The stock market analysts will look at it and go “yeah, but you ‘lost’ $22 million from last quarter…” and they will punish Kroger for failing.
Even worse…
Let’s say Kroger raised their prices and pulls in a profit of $915 million next quarter… they can STILL get punished if the market goes “Yeah, but our analysts expected you to bring in $921 million in profit.”
Failing to meet or beat “expectations” is just as bad as raking in less of a profit than last time.
So prices go up, because they have to make more money than the same time last month, last quarter, last year.
abolish the stock market. put these hogs on a fucking island with no natural resources but sand and salt water. set up a camera and let us watch.
It’s interesting how recent the stock market really is:
https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/history-of-the-stock-market/
"The first modern stock trading market was created in Amsterdam when the Dutch East India Company was the first publicly traded company. To raise capital, the company decided to sell stock and pay dividends of the shares to investors. Then in 1611, the Amsterdam stock exchange was created. For many years, the only trading activity on the exchange was trading shares of the Dutch East India Company.
At this point, other countries began creating similar companies, and buying shares of stock was popular for investors. The excitement blinded most investors and they bought into any company that began available without investigating the organization. This resulted in financial instability, and eventually in 1720, investors became fearful and tried to sell all their shares in a hurry. No one was buying however, so the market crashed.
. . .
Although the first stock market began in Amsterdam in 1611, the U.S. didn’t get into the stock market game until the late 1700s. It was then that a small group of merchants made the Buttonwood Tree Agreement. This group of men met daily to buy and sell stocks and bonds, which became the origin of what we know today as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Although the Buttonwood traders are considered the inventors of the largest stock exchange in America, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange was America’s first stock exchange. Founded in 1790, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange had a profound impact on the city’s place in the global economy, including helping spur the development of the U.S.’s financial sectors and its expansion west."
I don’t know if my highschool education is failing me, but the US declared independence in 1776, so I feel like the US not having a stock market until the late 1700s makes a lot of sense.
How old are you that 500 years is still recent?
Well, when you consider that humans go back 300,000 years or so, and “civilization”, such as it is, goes back 10,000 - 12,000 years, 500 years is really not much at all.
That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the Dutch East India Company was under a legal charter where they could make war with and enslave whoever they wanted to as a quasi-independent entity.
That’s what the stock market concept is based upon. Slavery and murder.
I mean, that’s a bit unfair. The stock market is a concept that’s based on expected annual growth paid out in a steady return on investment. Slavery and murder just happen to be incredibly lucrative industries, such that you could confidently invest in firms like Dutch East India and expect more than you put in.
Pick up a copy of Picketty’s “Capitalism In the 21st Century” and you can see how this played out over the long term. Prior to Capitalist market mechanics, you’d have these feudal estates that would levy rents with a steady-state expectation of returns. You had 10,000 acres being worked by 100 farmers and they tithed you their surplus in food. You warehoused that food and traded it back to them for their labor, with which you built churches and castles and recruited soldiers for your next war. But the real economy was stagnant, outside fluctuations in population from plague or invasion or natural disaster.
Then you get this idea of cumulative return on investment, and there’s this sudden rapid expansion of commerce and capital that simply had no historical parallel. This didn’t need to be predicated on bloodshed or occupation. The textile industry boom in the UK, for instance, was this more-or-less bloodless conflagration of productive forces. Huge industrial looms turned a desperately scare resource into a cheap consumer commodity within a span of a few decades. And a big part of that was the feedback loop of investment -> capital production -> lucrative returns -> re-investment.
Similarly, the boom in agricultural productivity thanks to the advent of modern fertilizers has functionally ended natural famines. This was, incidentally, a knock on effect of the Loom Boom, as the first industrial fertilizers were derived from pesticides which were derived from clothing dyes.
The pain and suffering that followed the Dutch East India Company was not a consequence of the market mechanic nearly so much as it was the consequence of an aristocracy with no countervailing force among the proles. It was consistent with the behavior of lords and kings going back thousands of years, just industrialized.
I always imagine the stockholder that trades off quarterly expectations to be someone sitting in an overly large home getting all bent out of shape because someone else’s labor didn’t make them enough money RIGHT NOW!
It isn’t one guy adjusting one portfolio relative to a single quarterly change in profits. You have to look at this as thousands of hedge funds with tens of billions of dollars in investor cash comparing Kroger to Safeway and Walmart and saying “I want 8% exposure to the cyclical consumer retail sector and I have $X-Billion to invest, how much of that do I want to distribute across these three companies?” And then if Kroger underperforms Safeway and Walmart, my algorithm tells me to sell Kroger stock and use the proceeds to buy up Safeway/Walmart.
This gives Safeway/Walmart a lower rate of effective borrowing, which means they can build new stores in territory adjacent to Kroger locations or expand into territory none of them dominate. It sets off a cascading effect in which Safeway gets to grow while Krogers treads water. Eventually, Safeway can start installing stores directly adjacent to Kroger and selling everything in this one storefront at 10% under cost-of-purchase until Krogers goes out of business from cut-rate competition. Then Safeway jacks up their prices at this one store and returns to rising profitability.
That’s the market mechanism in effect. Low lending rates mean you can drive your competitors out of business. So everyone needs to run a competitive profit margin in order to avoid getting swallowed up by their neighbors. And the folks who decide if you’re “competitive” are a handful of mega-investment banks that decide how much of your stock they’re going to buy.
Why does Biden go after anything but minimum wage? Just because min wage isn’t a winning issue doesn’t make the problem go away.
Because only Congress can change the minimum wage. You know, the one half controlled by Republicans.
Sure, that is why. Poor Biden, he would help the working class, only if he could. Give president absolute power to use it when they need to help the rich, but when it helps the working class, all of a sudden they are powerless.
You remember the whole student loan forgiveness situation? The executive can only do things that the legislature has granted it power to do. And even then, the supreme court can show up and stop it for whatever reason they pull out of their ass.
Despite what Trump says, the President is not a king. The legislature is by the far the most powerful branch and is most to blame for the current situation. Blame them and especially the filibuster in the Senate.
Didn’t democrats vote in executive power for president during Obama administration so the president can act on their own? Kinda funny how democrats complain republicans are authoritarian, when they give presidents power of kings.
All presidents used executive power for lesser reasons. These are just PR games for naive voters.
No, that’s something Fox News made up. And I have no idea why you’re replying to a 3 week old comment.
More in the news: government official complains about matters within their jurisdiction.
You have to be some kind of moron to think it would be a good idea for the president to start dictating prices to grocery chains. Unfortunately Lemmy is largely populated by idiots and delusional fools, so I expect this observation to be unpopular.
Read a history book sometime. It’s been done in the past.
I’m not sure why you’d advocate for it if you’ve actually read the history, it’s a terrible idea that has failed spectacularly in the past
mate half the food you eat is subsidized.
Talking about price controls which are not the same thing at all. Read about the Nixon shock, for example.
Just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.
Government grocery stores would solve this and food deserts…
What are you, some kind of Communist? You can’t have government run retail outlets. It would be inefficient! It would prevent innovation! It would desaturate the market! It would cause millions of farmers to go bankrupt overnight! The employees would all be rapists and arsonists and unionists, while the managers would be bloated government bureaucrats who only care about their cushy government jobs!
You would cause famine and poverty across the entire nation. It would be the worst thing to happen to the country since the Postal Service!!!
But then the government would have to remedy the surplus of food by implementing food banks. Then markets would crash because everyone would go to food banks instead of grocery stores. Then money would be worthless and the government would have to step in and offer some type of work for rations program. And if that’s successful, it would spread to other industries for furniture and other goods. Is Biden going full Kropotkin?
Based and Breadpilled.
