Two journalists, Joh Schwarz and Ken Klippenstein, at The Intercept have an important article explaining the role of corporate price gouging in the current struggle with inflation.
The article is titled “CEO Says He’s Been ‘Praying for Inflation’ Because It’s an Excuse to Jack Up Prices.”
Only such a rare, candid moment could explain the capitalist system in a nut shell.
Just as nothing will cause a heartless CEO to find religion as quickly as the prospect of a higher profit margin!
Halleluiah! Praise God! And pass the plate.
By his own admission, this corporate big-wig admits that, along with the current international supply-train issues, corporate price gouging is another major factor in driving up prices for American consumers.
Here is an excerpt:
As corporate profits reach record high, Iron Mountain executive tells Wall Street inflation is great for “the bottom line.”
THE CEO OF Iron Mountain Inc. told Wall Street analysts at a September 20 investor event that the high levels of inflation of the past several years had helped the company increase its margins — and that for that reason he had long been “doing my inflation dance praying for inflation.”
The comment is an unusually candid admission of a dirty secret in the business world: corporations use inflation as a pretext to hike prices. “Corporations are using those increasing costs – of materials, components and labor – as excuses to increase their prices even higher, resulting in bigger profits,” Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, recently argued. Corporate profits are now at their highest level since 1950. . .
. . . It wasn’t a one-off comment by the Iron Mountain CEO, William Meaney. On a 2018 earnings call, he invoked a Native American ritual, telling participants that “it’s kind of like a rain dance, I pray for inflation every day I come to work because … our top line is really driven by inflation. … Every point of inflation expands our margins.”
Iron Mountain’s CFO Barry A. Hytinen also said on an earnings call this past April that “we do have very strong pricing power” and for the company, inflation is “actually a net positive.”
Click here to read the entire article.
