Corporations are a lot more willing than usual to raise their prices lately, and it’s putting more of the burden of high inflation on consumers.

That may not come as much of a surprise to anyone who has browsed a grocery aisle, kicked the tires at a car dealership or filled up a gas tank of late, but even the Bank of Canada is starting to take notice of the trend, as the central bank continues its battle to wrestle inflation into submission.

Speaking to a parliamentary committee in Ottawa this week, the bank’s governor, Tiff Macklem, told lawmakers that the bank has noticed a troubling new trend coming out of the corporate sector.

For much of the past few decades, any time businesses have seen a jump in their input costs — the amount they pay for things like raw materials, energy and even workers — “they were pretty cautious about passing on [that cost into] the prices they charged for goods and services,” Macklem said.

Their reasoning was simple: they were afraid of losing customers.

  • athos77@kbin.social
    20·
    1 year ago

    for the 20 years leading up to 2022, corporate profits were responsible for about one-third of inflation. Last year, however, that ratio jumped to two-thirds, which means that despite legitimate increases in their cost of doing business, their take-home share of every consumer dollar effectively doubled.

    Record profits everywhere - except for employees and consumers.

    Advice for consumers for much of the past year has boiled down to either trying to cut back on expenses, or increasing income, but Stanford says it’s misleading to put the onus on consumers to solve inflation, since they’re the ones bearing the disproportionate burden of it.