[gassius]

I don't know anything about lumber market and it's transitory conditions and fluctuations (other than a last week news where I live, northern Spain, that said that woods price are at all time high supposedly because demand is also at records high, from international markets including japan) so it may very well be a transitory price fluctuation because WFH or whatever.

That being said, taking out the "runaway" adjective, inflation should be expected as a logical consequence of the monetary policy at least in US and Europe, and as a matter of fact, consumer price index are already up all across the board and both Fed and ECB had already adjusted their inflation target up. This should surprise no one, you just cannot increase the monetary mass by trillions in the year where the global economy shutted down due a global pandemic and not expect an inflationary spike. The global public debt won't be "paid" without an increase on inflation.

And this is not a criticism on the political behind this. The decision was made to ease the economic impact of the pandemic both in the general public and the private sector and in most cases this was achieved, but that doesn't mean the impact does not exist, is just that is being spread out in 20 years, and part of that would be on inflation.

[llbeansandrice]

I'm more than onboard with the idea that recent monetary policies have put pressure on prices, I just don't see how anyone can sanely say that a 4x price increase is (was) "caused by inflation". Of course implying that all or the vast majority of the increase is directly attributable to inflation, adding "runaway" back into the discussion.

[gassius]

Yeah I didn't intend it like an antagonistic answer, because actually is not a binary issue. Price takes in account many consideration, fluctuations in production and/or demand are one, monetary pressure is other, but there are many others (expectation of future behavior, for example). I would guess that, at this time, the larger the increase ratio, the more probable is that transitory elements are affecting the price.

Just a minor caveat I would have with your answer is that inflation cause price increase, when for me the price increase is just an indicator of inflation, not a cause or consequence of it.

[imtringued]

It wasn't monetary policy that drove inflation. It was the fiscal stimulus. It didn't cause lumber prices to go up by much though, that was just a basic supply shock. I doubt that fiscal stimulus did raised lumber prices by more than 10-20%.