Did profits increase? Potentially, yes. But they couldn't have increased without the enabling condition of massive money printing.
Companies were trying to maximize profits before 2020. That hasn't changed. What changed was the monetary policy.
Those corporate profits wouldn't be causing the inflation.
They would potentially be the place where they are first noticeable and measurable according to certain measurements, but in a complex system that you do not have instrumented up completely, the first place you see a particular thing appear is not necessarily its origin point. Anyone debugging distributed systems should have direct experience with that.
This is not what is happening, but I kind of this kind of boundary analysis where you stick large numbers in to a system like a helpful way to feel out the landscape of a problem like this.
I'm open to the idea that this or that corporate action is making things better or worse. But "inflation is bad because corporations discovered greed in 2020" is such an obvious falsehood that it calls into question why anyone is even pushing it as a reason. Greed was invented somewhere around the time the first cell divided into a second cell, not several years ago.
What in the world? I get that “Big Capital” is an easy boogeyman but how do you think this works? If you print money, so you can exchange that for someone else’s goods, what entitles you to “get it back”??
The "entitlement" the government has is their transitory monopoly on violence. And in a functioning democracy that monopoly is exercised according to how society at large believes it will benefit them.
It's important to remember money arises naturally but the dynamics of how its used and its value is partly a top-down decision. It's really a tool of persuasion not some universal marker of value. The stock market wouldn't fluctuate wildly around meme stocks etc if that were true. Argentinians can tell you that the underlying economy might not always reflect the market value of money itself.
I'm not villifying big capital , it's just prudent to be wary of it as a phenomenon. Big capital allowed for huge distributed tech/infrastructure creation like computers (with a nudge from the gov). All the actors within those organisations are just acting 'rationally' within the contraints that have been set for them. But these current constraints might not be what's best for society in the long term.
The reason you would need it back is to preserve the system (for those who are being taxed also)- as money accrues, the ability to rent-seek rises which raises costs for all of society and reduces productivity and more importantly the well-being of the population. Past a point workers won't feel invested in working, elites will start infighting to get a foot in the shrinking doorway.
Companies and humans operate on incentives. The one to blame is the ones who control those incentives.
Look at the last 4 times inflation yas gone through the roof - every time it was a supply shock, a trafe embargo or a war.
Have a look at this: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/02/13/t...