Any theory that suggests a grand conspiracy involving most of the companies in the country (and world) simultaneously all changing their behavior in an immoral way, in tandem, is a pretty much instant rejection for me.
If people are willing to pay these prices, why should companies not be raising their prices?
There has been an enormous increase in net worth of all age brackets in the US in the last few years (as of 2022 data[1]), all data points adjusted for inflation. I think this is enough to explain why consumers are paying for these items.
Feel free to experiment with this graph tool from the US Federal Reserve's website and please respond if you have any other explanations:
1. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
Food is an interesting one. In my experience the value of fast food is at an all time low. Before it would be half the price of a sit down place. Nowadays it's more like 80% of the price. I'm not sure what exactly happened there. I went to subway and my bill was $15. I went to a sitdown place and my bill was $19.
According to those graphs, even the bottom quartile saw a substantial increase in net worth during the pandemic [1]. Sure, this is much less in absolute terms than the higher quartiles, but as a percentage increase it's actually far higher (almost 1000% between 2019 and 2022).
This doesn't detract from your point that poorer people don't benefit much from capital gains, but I think it's still worth pointing out.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
Which one is the most aligned with your interests is a difficult question, or at least not one I know the answer to, but it's probably not whichever one is the smallest business.
Personally I don't consider this "greedflation," but post-pandemic economics exposed that the equilibrium between producers and consumers was vulnerable to a major shift (in favor of the producers), and they took advantage of that.
Blackrock does vote its shares for you most of the time, which can be a big impact, but my understanding is the practical impact of this has mainly been that BlackRock tells companies to care about climate change more and then Republican attorneys general get mad at them for this and write threatening letters about it.
The cycle where CalPERS puts all their money into tech startups and makes Silicon Valley VCs rich is more interesting I think.
I would say capitalism is a system which innately maximizes for greed. When the money supply expands, greedflation is outright expected - no collusion or conspiracy required.
It's the same sort of misdirection we have in California with gas prices, etc...
Expect a lot more of this type of activist "journalism" in the near future.