<story><title>Greedflation: Corporate profiteering &apos;significantly&apos; boosted global prices,study</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/07/greedflation-corporate-profiteering-boosted-global-prices-study</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mr_toad</author><text>An expense is always someone else’s profit.  All inflation, all prices, everywhere, is the result of someone putting up their prices, trying to make as much money as they can.&lt;p&gt;If it’s not the retailers, it’s the wholesalers, the suppliers, the utility providers, the lenders, the executives, the land-owners, the unions and even finally the workers.  All of them trying to make as much money as they can.  All of them raising their prices whenever (and if) they can.&lt;p&gt;Greed is not an explanation, because greed is everywhere in the supply chain, right down to the bottom.  The question shouldn’t be why they wanted to (since why wouldn’t they?), but why they could.&lt;p&gt;Examining which part of the supply chain put their prices up seems pointless unless it sheds light on why that part of the supply chain in particular &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; put their prices up.</text></comment>
<story><title>Greedflation: Corporate profiteering &apos;significantly&apos; boosted global prices,study</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/07/greedflation-corporate-profiteering-boosted-global-prices-study</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Manuel_D</author><text>The whole &amp;quot;greedflation&amp;quot; narrative still doesn&amp;#x27;t seem plausible. Why wouldn&amp;#x27;t one company reduce prices and capture the market share from the companies that artificially raised prices? In order for the &amp;quot;greedflation&amp;quot; to work, there must be some collusion in terms of price setting. This &lt;i&gt;does&lt;/i&gt; happen in the market, but it&amp;#x27;s illegal and governments do take action against price-fixing [1]. A much more plausible explanation is that the economy as a whole had a massive rebound after the pandemic, and the record profits are just a byproduct of that rebound.&lt;p&gt;1. An example from my State: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.atg.wa.gov&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;news-releases&amp;#x2F;406-million-way-low-income-washingtonians-result-ag-ferguson-lawsuits#:~:text=Washington%20was%20the%20first%20state,by%20the%20price%2Dfixing%20conspiracy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.atg.wa.gov&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;news-releases&amp;#x2F;406-million-way-lo...&lt;/a&gt; It&amp;#x27;s not always super high-profile, but lawsuits against anti-competitive practices happen all the time.</text></comment>