Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to News@lemmy.world – 664 points –
Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds
theguardian.com
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No fuckin way. But they said it was the cost of goods and shipping!

I herd it was cuz damn people were forcing them to pay huge wages

That's the McKinnsy foundation...

A bunch of Ivy League recent graduates who will become CEOs or politicians some day.

For American companies they get paid millions to say "you have to do layoffs and raise CEO pay, also charge customers more" regardless of what the question was.

But what they do overseas is worse. They work for dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and try to help them improve their public images and hide the horrible shit they do.

At least that's what they admit, they do a lot worse just often require their clients never mention McKinsey's involvement

Saudi Arabia threw them under the bus tho and said this:

The limitations of this model came into sharp focus recently, with the revelation that McKinsey may have inadvertently played a role in Saudi Arabia’s mistreatment of critics. On October 20th, the Times reported that the government of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had employed operatives to harass dissidents, including the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on October 2nd. The article included the revelation that McKinsey had prepared a nine-page report measuring the public perception of certain Saudi economic policies, and cited three individuals who were driving much of the largely negative coverage on Twitter: a Saudi Arabia-based writer named Khalid al-Alkami, a dissident living in Canada named Omar Abdulaziz, and an anonymous writer. After the report was created, Al-Alkami was arrested, and Abdulaziz’s brothers living in Saudi Arabia were put in prison. The anonymous Twitter channel was shut down.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mckinseys-work-for-saudi-arabia-highlights-its-history-of-unsavory-entanglements

They literally help far right dictators harras journalists, which can lead to their deaths or torture.

You may have heard of them when it came out Pete Buttiegeig did overseas work for them.

It's why he dropped out of public eye and stopped pretending to be a progressive but I'm worried in a decade he'll be back doing it again and people might fall for it

That was last time, we had a wage-price spiral. Wages went high, which pushed prices up, which pushed wages up, etc

On this occasion it is a price-nothing spiral. Prices go up, wages stay static, prices go up, etc

I like how every layman said that this is what was happening but in the moment you could find half a dozen 'economists' on national news networks explaining it as if it was all just normal and no one was benefiting from it. Economics is a fake science, it's not even worthy of the title social science. It's literally just learning how to justify rich peoples actions and nothing else.

Economics is just astrology but for bros in business suits and without all the fun parts of astrology.

Your thinking of the stock market. The basic principles of Economics are alive and well. Despite all the screwed up stuff the basics of supply and demand have held true the entire way.

find half a dozen ‘economists’ on national news networks

Oh, you mean that news that is owned by the very same oligarchs? Everyone should just collectively start ignoring national news. (Not trying to agitate you, dear potato, just...yeah, national news, their owners, and their 'economists' should be banned and charged with some crime for lying to the nation at every turn.)

Just like any other field of study, you can buy an expert pretty easily. It doesn't mean Economics is fake. It Means those guys got paid to say that by someone like the US Chamber of Commerce. (Which isn't a government agency, no matter how much they try to seem like one)

If you want to know how bad we're being fucked, search for the PPI, the producer price index. CPI, the one we always hear about, is the measure of inflation to us, the consumer. The PPI is the measure of inflation to producers, what they pay for goods and services to produce the goods and services we buy.

The PPI has been back to "normal" for a while now. Pretty much as soon as the post COVID logistics issues were mostly ironed out. The difference between PPI and CPI changes is pure profit.

We don't get daily articles on the PPI though, I wonder why.

Edit: tell people about PPI whenever you can, online or off, the more people know, the better. It's easy enough to say inflation is just down to greed but being able to back it up by comparing two simple charts will help people really understand.

For anyone curious, here are the BLS pages for PPI and CPI where you can see just how badly they're screwing us. Especially when you look at the long term graph showing that they're just barely above where they were a decade ago.

It is not accurately "pure profit," but this is a post that is so common sense and dead on that quibbling on that detail misses the point.

The question is: why would they reduce costs if they're being paid? People being mad about it doesn't affect their bottom line unless it actually affects their bottom line.

It's more profitable to keep up the misery and take the gain until forced to change then apologize and change. It's free money. Why would they charge less if they can make money charging more? There is no incentive for them to bring down their own profit margins just because people don't like it.

Hopefully the knowledge can affect their bottom line. Consumer sentiment affects spending habits. If people know they're being gouged instead of just feeling like it, maybe they'll curb their non-essential spending enough to put downward pressure on prices.

Maybe not, but it can't hurt.

We know.

That's what happens when both of your ruling parties are bought, paid-for, and only interested in finding ways to send more of our money to war.

Article needs some charts and graphs. Ross Perot had a good approach to economic messaging, strong enough to peel support away from the repubs. He just got on tv and basically gave a business presentation. With lots of charts and graphs. Not too different from the youtuber perun's video style.

Fox News already takes this approach, and abuses it of course. But it's one of the drivers of their success imo. Data visualizations have a different appeal from narrative-based presentations, certain kinds of learners tend to just naturally prefer them for whatever reason.

Wonderful. What are we gonna do about it?

crickets

The best part is that all those profits can pay off anyone who's in a position to stop you.

yea it is an endless circle in Turkey too, people get %10 raise and then prices increase by %15 because salary costs increase. It has been like this since the last 5 years and basically the price of everything increased about 15-20 times (salaries 10-15 depending what you are doing).

It is telling that prices have gone up so much on manufactured products, but there has been nearly no change in price of meat from a butcher

Land usage prices haven't changed, raw materials haven't changed. It's just the companies.