The Economy

I'm just astounded by the stupidity of that boycott.

If you liked shitty beer before the influencer campaign, nothing should have changed from your perspective. They still sell shitty beer.

 

Nah. It's consumers spending too much money without a care about how much anything costs, pushing prices higher.

This gets really tedious.

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Take a look at the ECB's balance sheet if you want to actually understand cause and effect, rather than just creating a silly narrative that makes people feel good. Look at what they did with the pandemic as an excuse. ...

Eurosystem balance sheet

For a decade and a half in Europe, they price-fixed the debt markets to make money free. ... They drove interest rates negative, robbing savers and investors (what fuels economic growth in a free society) so that politicians could run bigger and bigger deficits to make everything "free," and control everyone's economic behavior. The spillover effect was that the free money turned markets into a casino. ... and the price inflation they were driving created bubbles out of asset prices, making the rich richer, while everyone else stagnated.

When the pandemic hit, the price for that came due all at once. ... but rather than deal with the consequences of a long period of stupidity, they monetized an insane amount of money in a very short period of time (making it worse in the process). They created euros out of thin air to buy up trillions of euros of bad debt, taking their balance sheet from about 4.5 trillion euros (huge already) to almost 8.5 trillion euros (making them the world's worset hedge fund, but with no consequences because they can just devalue their currency to overpay for worthless debt). That let the consumer price inflation genie out of the bottle, and all of the demand it created (with supply constrained by the pandemic) unleased massive consumer price inflation that is now sticky. ... and is crippling Europeans.

Europe is fucked because it has lived a multi-decade fantasy fueled by kindgertaren ideas and monetized debt. Now it has stagflation as a result. Germany is in recession, for example. ... but inflation is raging. It's a double whammy. The only way out is to grow the fuck up and accept the reality that there is no free lunch. It means that fiscally, those European governments that are insolvent can't be enabled anymore by the ECB monetizing their destructive behavior. It won't be a quick fix, but that is the only way they have a chance now of getting inflation under control. Unfortunately, the higher interest rates (with money actually costing something, what a novel idea!) mean that economically things have to get tougher (off of already tough conditions) before they can get better. The bigger they let that balance sheet get in the link above. ... the greater the price they created for people in Europe. It should have never gotten there, but it's too late.