It is. If you’ve never learned economic except from cryptocurrency marketing material, inflation simply refers to the prices of goods and services increasing, not any one specific cause. That can happen due to real changes in demand or supply, government policy changes, or other factors like changes in the labor market. It’s key to understand why inflation is happening because that tells you both whether it’s a problem - almost all serious economists think modest inflation is good for keeping the economy moving – and what kinds of fixes might be needed. For example, a crop failure will cause a spike in prices but if you don’t have reason to expect a late frost to happen again you probably don’t need to make structural changes; if some industrial component costs more because mines are running out, you might need a larger intervention.
In this case, prices went all over the place during the pandemic and the question is how they recover – companies are a lot quicker to raise prices than lower them and if you look at the business press there were a lot of record profits reported - the most since the 1950s when American companies were reaping the profits of uninterrupted production capacity selling to post-WWII Europe:
That's _part_ of how inflation works. The current inflation cycles is numerous different issues compounded (corporate profit seeking, money printing, supply chain issues, extremely high employment rate, pay increases). I know crypto bros like to say it's only money printing, so they can point to their fake money and say "you can't print money here", but the world isn't so simplistic.
In this case, prices went all over the place during the pandemic and the question is how they recover – companies are a lot quicker to raise prices than lower them and if you look at the business press there were a lot of record profits reported - the most since the 1950s when American companies were reaping the profits of uninterrupted production capacity selling to post-WWII Europe:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corpor...
The St. Louis Fed estimated 60% of the inflation in 2021 was profit-taking:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177180972/economists-are-rec...
The story in Europe is similar with roughly half:
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/06/26/europes-inf...