Systemic Inflation Persists as Financial Institutions Exploit Structural Price Volatility for Profit
Original framing: “JPMorgan Strategist Expects CPI Above 4% with Signs of Easing Energy Inflation” — Bloomberg
The 1970s oil shocks were not natural events but the result of OPEC's response to Western financial dominance, yet mainstream narratives erase this geopolitical context. The Volcker Shock of 1980-82 deliberately crushed labor to discipline inflation, revealing how monetary policy serves class interests. Financial deregulation in the 1990s enabled derivatives markets to bet on commodity prices, turning volatility into profit streams for banks like JPMorgan.
The JPMorgan strategist's forecast is not a neutral prediction but a performative act that legitimizes financial extraction by framing inflation as an external force beyond control.
This narrative obscures how banks like JPMorgan have spent decades engineering the very volatility they now claim to measure, from lobbying for deregulation to dominating commodity derivatives markets. Historical parallels abound: the 1970s oil shocks were amplified by financial speculation, and the Volcker Shock demonstrated how inflation control serves as a pretext for class warfare. Yet cross-cultural wisdom—from Indigenous stewardship to Islamic finance—offers alternative models where price stability is a communal responsibility, not a speculative opportunity. The solution pathways must therefore invert this logic: democratize measurement, break speculative cycles, and redirect financial power toward public goods, treating inflation not as a technical problem but as a symptom of unchecked financial feudalism.