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> The only way to reduce prices of oil/gas and fertilizers (for food) is to bring back the amount of oil/gas and ammonia that went offline due to Russia. There is no amount of digging anywhere in the world that will quickly replace this much lost natural resource. At least this has a modicum of common sense to it. As others have pointed out, oil prices fluctuate all the time though. So do food prices. Gas can affect retail prices, because to me, common sense says, you use gas, not oil, to move food from wherever it is to the supermarket and into people's carts, back to their homes. And gas prices are not oil prices. And a lot of the price of many goods is, secretly, gas, because that is how the people get to where they work, how the goods that are otherwise useless without transportation get to where they're sold, etc. > What raising interest rates will do is cause less spending in all non-oil/gas goods and services. So what? The CPI, even the "core" CPI, is food and gas, or food and gas in disguise. Even if you buy less clothing, a lot of the price of the clothes doesn't come from demand. It comes from the price of the gas used to move it from A to B and all the people involved moving it, and the price of the food to feed all the people who made it and sell it. Gas and food are hiding in all the inputs of clothes. There is a floor on the cost of clothes, it keeps rising, what exactly will increasing interest rates do to the rising (producer's) cost of clothes? |
The reality is that as long as so much of oil/gas inflation exists and interest rates rise, something other things will HAVE to give. People will just have to be ok with a life of less abundance.