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This is a bad take in a couple of ways, starting with the title. "Is Inflation Caused by Greedy Corporations?" offers a 'Simplistic, facile narrative' that inflation has a single cause, which it doesn't. A better question would be "Are Greedy Corporations Contributing to Inflation?" You would be hard pressed to answer this in the negative, which leads to the actual question "How Much Are Greedy Corporations Contributing to Inflation?" Matt Stoller broke it down about a year ago: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/corporate-profits-drive-60-of-inflation

"the question of why inflation only picked up in the past year or two." - Because once supply chains and other issues started the inflation ball rolling, corporations had cover to increase prices, since consumers had started to expect price increases. Or, "our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures led to improved profitability overall," says the leading egg supplier. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

"And if they set prices too high they won’t sell enough, also resulting in lower profits." This is incorrect in a couple ways: we can all think of "luxury" brands who create artificial scarcity by underproducing, and then make a huge profit. But this is also called Type II inflation, and wealth inequality contributes to it. You can see an example of looking at charts of Argentina's productive capacity during high inflation; production fell while prices went up.

"The companies that balance these considerations most skillfully will win market share" - this ignores the monopolistic concentrations of market share that exist. When there's only a few corporations that control a market, profit considerations are more important than market share. After all, which one drives the stock price?

The fourth-to-last paragraph is a hodgepodge of questions, presumably not all serious, that go unanswered, but I'll take on one: "if we don’t want to see corporations making large profits while consumers are being squeezed by higher prices, what options are available to prevent it?" The populists at the end of the 19th century advocated for breaking up large corporations to bring more competition to bear; i.e. antitrust action. Another option would be for the government to buy out a supplier in concentrated industries, to serve as a baseline for fair prices. The TVA did something similar, selling electricity at a fair price, thereby preventing its local competitors from price gouging. And Bernie has suggested a windfall profits tax.

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