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Because they didn't know the pricing power they had. The macro gave them cover to stretch and see what would happen.


A lot of economics seems to me like the “perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum” jokes you hear about physics. There’s no concept of friction or activation energy. “The market” simply adjusts in real time without human interaction.

In the real world someone needs to pitch a price increase. There’s risk that sales and profits might drop. That’s bad for the company and that persons career. When everyone else is raising prices and your costs are going up then that risk:reward ratio looks different.

My company was seeing increased material costs, they raised prices to cover that and then some. Sales are down but profits went up slightly. I was in the meetings where this was discussed yet people will tell me it doesn’t happen.


It's because if you are involved in economics, you've already bought the "markets are the most efficient by definition" dogma, so you cannot question that maybe untestable wild ass-pull theories from some dude writing a book aren't actually an accurate model of the real world.

Economics is at the level of aristotlian physics: "Surely lighter objects fall slower, it just makes sense and I have demonstrated so with this feather!" was the law of physics for millennia until someone actually decided to measure it in a way that could isolate the force of gravity.




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