In April, Société Générale economist Albert Edwards released a scathing note saying he hadn’t seen anything like the current levels of corporate greed in his four decades working in finance. He said companies were using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to hike prices in search of profits.
“The end of Greedflation must surely come. Otherwise, we may be looking at the end of capitalism,” Edwards wrote. “This is a big issue for policymakers that simply cannot be ignored any longer.”
Exactly. The article is pay walled so I couldn’t get too specific since I don’t known it’s scope but my suggestion here is that it’s not complete naïveté not to have automatically assumed the war in Ukraine would lead to both actual inflationary pressure as well as cover for just plain old price gouging because that price gouging behavior on its own doesn’t make good business sense even hard nosed and cynically motivated, it requires both greed and concentrated ownership in cartels. Presumably we should see this greedflation happening unevenly in particular sectors where cartels or cartel like conditions have flourished.