Last week, Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, joined All Things Considered, Pod Save America, and Positively Dreadful to discuss how companies are still celebrating unusually high profits even as inflation remains hot and supply chain issues ease. As she told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly:
“What we’re seeing right now is companies are really taking advantage of this moment to go higher than they need to on markups and on profits…This unprecedented moment in our economy begs the question of whether it’s time for a federal price gouging statute to prevent some of this egregious profiteering during moments of real economic hardship and crisis.”
Email press@groundworkcollaborative.org to speak to Dr. Owens about inflation and corporate profiteering ahead of tomorrow’s corporate profit data release. And go to endcorporateprofiteering.org for Groundwork’s latest research.
Groundwork’s Lindsay Owens Talks Inflation, Corporate Profiteering:
NPR: Why some blame record corporate profits for high prices (Listen here)
“The CEO [of H.B. Fuller] recently told an analyst that he’s getting a little bit of savings as some of these costs in the economy are declining. But he’s not passing any of that back along to the consumer. So he says, ‘we don’t reduce prices.’”
“In theory, this type of profiteering wouldn’t really be possible, right? A competitor would come in, undercut one of the big players and drive prices down. But what we’re seeing at the moment is that the companies with the biggest market share…are the ones who are really engaging in the most egregious profiteering.”
Pod Save America: “Mitch Better Have Their Money.” (Listen here)
“[Corporations] can all keep prices high because they’re not worried about undercutting each other. If you’ve got artificially high prices, you should have a competitor come in and drive down prices – offer a lower, competitive price. You don’t see that in places where you don’t have a lot of market competition…”
“Americans should be incredibly wary of folks selling unemployment as the cure for inflation…That is a cure worse than the disease – plain and simple. And it’s a false choice. We don’t have to choose between low prices and low unemployment – we can have both.”
Positively Dreadful: Is It The Economy, Stupid? (Listen here)
“And even as some of [input]costs are coming down, the producer price index is falling a little bit faster than the amount that consumers are paying. They’re not passing along any of that savings to consumers.”
“We know that firms that had a lot of pricing power before the pandemic are actually the ones driving the biggest markups…the pricing that comes right on top of those costs to drive profits.”