What's driving rising business costs?

stanleykm

Our economy is an oroborous of middlemen all using tariffs and inflation as excuses to raise their prices

cc-d

That's us actually. It's pretty much all busy work at this point.

anotherhue

State sponsored monopolies is my vote. It's a failure of government to have fewer than ten players (non-Trusting) in any industry.

alephnerd

From TFA (becuase apparently HNers can't read): "Sharp Increases in the Cost of Insurance and Utilities" > "The largest increase by a wide margin was for employee health insurance, which saw an average increase of 14.2 percent among manufacturers and 12.9 percent for service firms" > "The next largest cost increase was for utilities, which climbed by 8.5 percent over the past year for both types of firms, with about 15 percent of all respondents reporting increases of 20 percent or more" > "Business insurance—which includes liability, property, auto, and workers’ compensation, among other things—climbed by about 7 percent, on average, for service firms and by 7.5 percent for manufacturers" I alluded to this before on HN [0] - much of the insurance woes faced are the legacy of the COVID pandemic, as a large portion of workers compensation funds are insolvent and healthcare pools are heavily stressed, leading to perverse incentives. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47047646

epistasis

We really need to switch to a National Health Service style of administration of health costs. Right now we have Medicare which makes unilateral cost determinations, and doctors and hospitals end up accepting below-cost reimbursement that because how could they turn away all the retired people, but they end up subsidizing these unilateral decisions with money from private insurance payors (namely everybody who's working). Medicare might not technically be a monopsony, but it acts like one, and all the rest of us working folks end up paying the gap that rounds out the rest of the costs. We have a few generations that have had easy lives, where they had easy access to homes, to higher education, to wealth building, and decided to cut off access to the same as soon as they got it, while still living off the labor of current working people that are not even allowed to build new apartments next to these wealthy people while they pay for all their health care. The economy is a massive multiple player rpg with a point system economy that's fixed by federal and state laws, and it's been rigged both at the health care level and at every level to extract wealth for those that had it easy in the past.

mcs5280

Unhinged greed

collabs

Let us not worry about "the whole economy". Yes, we know there is massive Executive overreach with tariffs and immigration. Yes, we know Congress is deadlocked to the point of being worse than useless. Yes, the SCOTUS also has its own problems with a majority of the public no longer having any faith in the judiciary. Lets start with things the FEDeral Reserve can fix, right here, right now. Narrow banking now. This is something the Federal Reserve can actually fix. Give every single US person (I am not a lawyer and I can't define what counts as a US person) a fee-free bank account with the Federal Reserve. Cut out the middle men of commercial banks. I think that alone will go a long way to drive down business costs.

underlipton

Financialization and the diffusion, across the economy, of the risk of dozens of major bad-bet nuclear detonations in the securities and commodities markets. The bets were never closed - not really - because the losses would have lead to immediate collapse. You're still paying for 2008 (and earlier debacles, and later ones, too). The economic output of the next few decades is already spoken for. This hits TFA's culprits, rising insurance and utilities costs. They're just the symptoms, not the source.

h4kunamata

Enshitification and the weird desire to please modern audience, are the only reasons. Until the early 2000s, things were built to last, solid build, simple. Now, even fridge has AI in it like what the actual f!!! Cars are tablets on wheels, Tesla and others, rather than just being cars. And this weird desire to please modern audience costing movies, products, videos games billions of dollars, closing studios thousands of jobs lost unable to make the investment back as consequences and yet, companies seem to do not read the room.