A new report by the progressive Groundwork Collaborative think tank claims that corporate greed is a primary driver of recent inflation. The report's authors argue that although inflation has cooled significantly since the pandemic, consumers continue to pay high prices set by corporations to pad their own earnings. “While prices for consumers have risen by 3.4 percent over the past year, input costs for producers have risen by just 1 percent,” the authors write. They argue that corporate profits drove more than 53 percent of inflation in the second and third quarters of 2023, whereas they drove 11 percent of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic.
