Groceries aren’t rising in price and giant supermarket chains aren’t making record profits.

The value of money is collapsing.

That’s what inflation is. How fast the money collapses.

If you’re a worker and you didn’t receive a 50 per cent pay rise since the beginning of Covid, then you have gone backwards financially.

If you’re a giant corporation and you haven’t made 50 per cent more profit since Covid, then you’ve gone backwards financially.

On paper it looks like we are in a period of record profits, but in reality the company has gone backwards. Saying that corporations are raking it in today is like saying a company in Zimbabwe was making a record profit by charging 10 trillion dollars for a bottle of milk.

This is because the value of money has collapsed since Covid began.

Your money buys around 50 per cent less food and shelter and fuel and so on since the start of the pandemic.

It’s not because there has been some huge increase in demand for food and shelter and fuel.

There’s just been a huge increase in the supply of money.

This is some of the most basic economics in the world, but it’s never put on the news and most people just blindly follow whatever the TV says.

One set of news anchors will blame greedy corporations. Another batch will blame retail shoppers buying too much stuff. Both sides are equally stupid.

The reality is corporations are just as greedy as they’ve always been and retail shoppers are buying just as much junk as they’ve always bought.

The only difference is you have 50 per cent more money competing for almost the exact same amount of supply.

The central bank is responsible for inflation and they are also responsible for calculating inflation. It is widely speculated that they fudge the numbers and say inflation is 6 or 7 per cent despite nearly everything in the real world doubling in price.

Then, instead of blaming themselves for inflation, the central bank blames whatever is happening in the world. It’s China’s fault, then it’s Russia’s fault, then it’s the weather’s fault, then it’s greedy corporations, then it’s retail shoppers, then it’s…

There is always an excuse or a convenient world event to blame inflation on. Every time I read an article about inflation, the author usually manages to find some way to pin domestic inflation on Putin to explain why cheese produced in Bega is now $15 a kilo.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for inflation, but most of the time it is as simple as how much money is being printed and circulated in the economy.

In Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, Argentina, and dozens of other places the bankers printed money until you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. The bankers in Western countries do the exact same thing, but they try to be more subtle about it and do it slowly so people barely even notice. They boil you slowly and then one day you wake up and realise your paycheque barely covers the necessities.