Part of what’s happening on this front (things are expensive) is antitrust-related.
Mergers and Acquisitions among competing companies, and ‘vertical integration’ along supply chains (both of which ought to get a lot more antitrust attention than they have for a long time) often means the resulting companies control supply enough that they can throttle supply and look, there’s not enough of the things! Prices then go up- and the loss in productive capacity that happens when competing firms consume each other is behind those mysterious ‘supply chain issues’ that led to empty shelves during the pandemic.
The election wave immediately following Watergate swept a lot of then-young, centrist Democrats into the halls of congress- and in so doing, also retired the Democrats’ institutional interest in anti-monopoly enforcement. Since then, neglecting antitrust enforcement on boring things like commodities and pharmaceuticals has been a bipartisan affair.
Part of what’s happening on this front (things are expensive) is antitrust-related.
Mergers and Acquisitions among competing companies, and ‘vertical integration’ along supply chains (both of which ought to get a lot more antitrust attention than they have for a long time) often means the resulting companies control supply enough that they can throttle supply and look, there’s not enough of the things! Prices then go up- and the loss in productive capacity that happens when competing firms consume each other is behind those mysterious ‘supply chain issues’ that led to empty shelves during the pandemic.
The election wave immediately following Watergate swept a lot of then-young, centrist Democrats into the halls of congress- and in so doing, also retired the Democrats’ institutional interest in anti-monopoly enforcement. Since then, neglecting antitrust enforcement on boring things like commodities and pharmaceuticals has been a bipartisan affair.