Companies are using inflation to price-gouge Americans – and making it worse | Robert Reich

Thanks to near-monopolies in many industries, corporations are seeing record profits as consumers struggle with high prices

We learned this week that the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.5% in March from a year earlier, up from 3.2% in February, and faster than most economists anticipated.

This poses a conundrum for central bankers who have made it clear they want to see further evidence that inflation is cooling before they cut interest rates.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com