A recession is a consequence of the price hikes, but is not a goal unto itself - it is also a tool used to get at the real goals, which are to discipline labor by creating higher levels of unemployment via business failures, a consolidation of capital (monopolization), which is also against labor, and finally, setting up the finance sector to hoover up the remains when rates are again dropped.

Simply put, they want you to be paid less, be more afraid of getting fired, and generally have less bargaining power with your employer(s). That runs counter to short-term profits. They know their logic about controlling inflation makes no sense.

Edit: oh and it also helps keep Europe in line

[–] agarorn@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Higher unemployment sounds like recession. At least it is hard for me to see how one would like one but not get the other too.

[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Due to how capitalists define recessions (not that they do so consistently when it's inconvenient), you could have pretty large unemployment but enough growth to avoid them calling it a recession. By a lot of reasonable folks' logic, unemployment is already kept high on purpose even during "boom" years, the furthest from recession. The same capitalist economists that engineer these things are deathly afraid of full employment as well and based this on, more or less, speculative bullshit.

The field of economics is mostly shit, they are mostly focused on keeping the wheels spinning in just the right way to optimize in the interest of profits over different timescales, including at worker expense. It's less about how to make the economy work in general and more how to keep it still working for business owners when thr whole thing implodes every 8-15 years.