New Studies Expose How Bad CEO Greed Has Surpassed Inflation

Food costs for Americans continue to soar – and so do the profits of the corporations selling us our food. In fact, multiple studies have found that the prices we’re paying for food far outpace the rate of inflation, and at the same time, corporations are spending their record profits on stock buybacks. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Food costs for Americans continue to soar, and so do the profits of the corporations selling us food. In fact, multiple studies have found that the prices we're paying for food far outpace the rate of inflation. At the same time, corporations are spending record profits on stock buybacks. Here's this, this is such an ugly story in the sense that, first of all, you have these corporations arguing, well, it's because of COVID. COVID made us do it. Well, really? Because COVIS is gone now and you're still coming in at these ridiculous increases. The other thing we're hearing is, well, this is because of the American Rescue Plan that Biden signed, that he signed. Well, there are two sides to that. Yes, it is. There's some inflation because of it. These things that Biden has done that are inflationary, the Inflationary Reduction Act actually became inflationary. They're making all these lobbyist arguments that really sound pretty convincing when you listen to what they're saying and they have the numbers to kinda show it. But at the end of the day, it's PepsiCo, people like Walmart, PepsiCo saying, look, we just want more money. We want to pay our CEOs more money. We want more money for ourselves and hell with everybody else.

Well listen, when we're in times of high inflation, as we've discussed a million times, we'll discuss it a million more times before we're through as well, in periods of high inflation corporations make it very clear, we're gonna raise our prices above what inflation is. And right now that rate is about 7%, a 7% increase over inflation is what these corporations are passing on to us. Pepsi, Kroger, Walmart, all the usual suspects here. So they are making more profits than at any other point in history while claiming, oh, no, no, no. Things are, we got to do this because inflation's so bad. No. All of the, The Lever put together all the numbers for all the companies.

Lever, by the way, if you have any doubt about this, go read The Lever. These folks get it right all the time.

Every time.

Every time. And I mean, the numbers are easy to look at. You got inflation at this rate, you got increases at this rate. You got stock buyouts that are skyrocketing. And the stock buyout, all it is, it's good for the shareholder, it's good for the people at the top and to hell with everybody else trying to buy milk or bread. It doesn't really make a difference.

Yeah. Because we're seeing grocery prices, the price of eggs has increased by 93%. So the price of eggs has almost doubled in the last two years. Milk is over 80% increase. We are getting screwed and part of that, little part of it is inflation because inflation's coming down a little bit, but the prices are not. So these companies, when they raised their prices during inflation, eventually they may drop 'em down a couple pennies and people will say, oh, okay, it came down, but they're still way higher than they were before inflation.

This isn't rocket science. There are indexes that show you this day to day. It's not like you have to figure this out. You got an inflation index, you got a price increase index. It's right there. And the truth of the matter is, I'm a little concerned that there hasn't been any effort to have price controls and say at least threaten them with price controls. Say, look, you continue to do this, you're 7% above what the inflation rate. I'm not seeing any reaction either way. You know it's about your stock buyouts. You know it's about the greed of management with a corporation.