Trade and industry have always been inventive in finding reasons why prices are increased.
They have never needed to be inventive for that...
Sometimes the dollar was too high, then too weak, then it was raw material shortages, then the Greens were to blame, and so on and so forth. Currently it is fashionable to blame everything on Donald to make his profit margins shine. And the unsuspecting believe all that as well.
... very few goods become more expensive because there are reasons for it — but simply because someone raised their prices. There are sometimes reasons in the sense of causes, but the game works without them as well: the news reports reasons as pretexts, and in 48 hours "time to the market" those pretexts have been processed at the local pubs. Corona and the bark beetle were at least domestic; Putin and Trump are far away abroad, but also domestic in the news. Austria or Belgium, for example, are direct neighboring countries but rarely appear in the news — accordingly, their influence on reinterpreting any events as "plausible causes of alleged market mechanisms" is weak. And therefore it remains as certain as the Amen in church that nothing becomes more expensive except prices. If there were real mechanisms behind it, such curves would also go downward. Interest rates actually do this, but only because of central banks doing it for control purposes. In reality, for every real market mechanism there are a hundred lies.
More certain than the “weather” is the “climate,” i.e. the long-term trend (towards sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker inflation). My motto "Build now" comes from the fact that waiting for Godot is the greatest risk of price increases that homebuilders face. And this own goal does not come from outside or above; the enemy placing it in your nest is only yourself. Incidentally, I cannot think of any price increase that would selectively affect only owners while sparing tenants — this argument against waiting is also reliably and gladly overlooked.