Comment by sporkland

That's just not true. Costs can go up. Somewhat tangential point: Imagine extracting resources from the ground and at first it's cheap but as it gets deeper and scarcer it takes more and more person/machine hours to extract the same amount.

In this case at least some of the price rise is related to the fact that we created a bunch of money. The price of goods is correlated with the amount of money in the system divided by the aggregate number of goods being sold. If number of goods remains the same but more money is in existence prices will rise, especially housing in US which leads to higher cost of labor, etc.

Note I'm not saying that greed didn't play a role in certain places in the run up of prices, but only that greed isn't the only thing that drives up prices.