Michael Perelman writes:
> The Wall Street Journal today has an article describing how companies are
> angling to raise prices, often by surreptitious means.
>
> In demand were strong, out and out price increases would be relatively
> easy to engineer. ...
I dunno. It seems to me that (if they hit a large enough part of the economy) price increases, whether surreptitious or not, represent inflation. Both types of price increases are allowed by demand, since people do figure out that quality has decreased or that there are hidden costs. If they don't figure it out for one product, then it cuts into the demand for another.
Instead, the existence of surreptitious price increases indicates that the officially-measured rate of inflation is lower than the actual rate.
------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
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