There’s a heated debate going on in economics about the root causes of inflation. Well, at least some economists believe there’s a heated debate. Others are brushing off the growing hype behind progressive ideas like “greedflation”—which posits that corporations exploited rising consumer prices during the pandemic and more recently the Ukraine war to increase margins. Inflation, under this theory, was exacerbated by corporate profiteering.
Mainstream economists argue the new profit-led inflation concept is merely a matter of semantics, however. They say their peers are just describing the “standard cyclical component to profits” that occurs during business cycles, as Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center, told Fortune last week. But Albert Edwards, a global strategist at French investment bank Société Générale, is sticking by his theory that greedflation has been a key driver of the surge in consumer prices over the past few years.
