Inflation is really just supply and demand, the demand for money seems constant but you should think if it as a rate of flow, too much flow and you erode systems and fixed values in the market that are meant to hold for a time. Essentially a price is meant to have some staying power, McDonald's made less on the dollar menu every month after they hit supply chain optimization on the goods on the menu but didn't tease the price because the volume of business was good and drove other business, inflation knocked that down As a knock on effect. An aspect of inflationary knock on effects and mitigating factors I'm exploring is money/value sinks, money in flow is bad if it is growing and increasing the flow rate beyond the market's regular utilization rate you want it flowing but you don't want more volume than the system requires because it has circular effects on the economic environment that drive constant change and undermines savings, some investments, and longterm exchange deals. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the river flow analogy works but so to does the carbon sink analogy. I suspect when china built their ghost cities it undermined an inflationary effect because capital resources in flow moved from being liquid assets to real estate. The market did burst but that was probably the plan all along, what other mechanisms of destroying excess capital does a communist regime have? The fact that speculators trade real estate as a liquid asset and regular people can't sink their capital into real estate and good real assets is likely fueling the flow problem in the economy. To take the analogy further the shores of three river have eroded so much that new streams are feeding the river, we need weirs and dams to manage the flow and that means regulation on flow via the population control I mentioned above and regulations restricting speculation(blackrock) and the dam being public works not necessarily funded by government, large material value being sequestered from the profit cycle effectively a carbon sink for bad money which envaluates the remaining supply mostly to curb inflation, a knock on effect is that labor demand drives the training and production of more laborers enabling the common people to afford workers for skilled maintenance and production on their real assets. These factors all relate and intuitively feel related; inflation is explicitly a monetary supply issue it can't happen to fiat currency without government(central bank) consent, defacto or otherwise. The least intuitive inflation relationship to me is lending rates I really should take some more time to look at that part of capital flow because I suspect this is the crux of modern economic problems. Opportunity cost economics is really just selling one's self into bondage from where I'm standing, the winners are the people taking the bets and runners up are the ones only taking bets they know they can win.