• tal@lemmy.today
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    2 hours ago

    Covid produced inflation, where the strength of the currency dropped. The Federal Reserve wouldn’t permit deflation, because you’d risk seeing a deflationary spiral. Instead, it’ll just see wages increase more quickly than prices for a period afterwards to restore buying power. This is a specific product that’s seeing a shortage — you can list plenty of points in the past where a good was in short supply and prices rose and then fell.

    EDIT: Just in computer hardware, to pick an example, hard drive prices went up when we had that flooding in southeast Asia fifteen years back.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods#Damages_to_industrial_estates_and_global_supply_shortages

    Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives…As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.