"....it seems that you acknowledge that inflation hasn't been due to all the causes you have been bleating about in this forum, but in fact 53% of it was due to corporations attempting to return to historical profit margins in the face of higher cost of money and continuing post-covid supply chain difficulties."
I acknowledge nothing of the sort; that's yet another straw man you built on the foundations of a false premise.
Inflation arises when the rate of change in an economy's capacity to supply falls short of the change in aggregate demand.
And over the post-Covid period, demand recovered strongly while industry struggled to ramp up supply commensurately. Hence, the inflationary pulse that reverberated across the globe.
If the genesis of the 2021 to 2023 inflation outbreak lay in the boardrooms of corporations, such as Kimberly-Clark, then that would be manifest in expansion of their operating margins at the outset, due to them discharging price increases at a rate faster than their input costs were rising.
But that didn't happen; as has been demonstrated to you, the exact opposite happened: the operating margins of Kimberly-Clark (your chosen example, remember, not mine) declined in 2021 and 2022.
Meaning that, rather than being a net discharger of inflation, the company was a net recipient of it.
In effect, over that period when inflation was at its worst, the company actually absorbed some of the inflationary shock, thereby cushioning the impact on its customers. In other words, it did the very opposite of gouging.
And then last year, it reduced that cushion and clawed back some of the margin which had been sacrificed.
Which would only be considered unreasonable to people lacking objectivity or stripped of an understanding of how the world works.
And not all the foregone margin has been recovered, mind. Because compared to the start of the global inflationary outbreak, the company's margins are current still some way behind.
A person would have to be ideologically blinkered or economically illiterate - or both, which increasingly appears to be the case - to classify the above developments as corporate greed.
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