On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Last Call,” Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama and on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council under President Bill Clinton dismissed arguments that corporate greed is the cause of inflation and argued that companies always try to maximize their profits and didn’t just start deciding to do so in the past couple years, and the real culprit was demand spiking.
Host Brian Sullivan asked, “Is corporate greed, in your mind, a part of this inflationary story?”
Furman answered, “I don’t think greed had very much to do with any of this. The thing to understand is that corporate greed is like gravity. It’s ever-present. In some trivial sense, every time there’s a plane crash, it’s because of gravity. But, in some more profound sense, you haven’t really explained the plane crash. Companies are always trying to maximize their profits. The question is, why, a couple of years ago, could they increase prices a lot, why they have less pricing power now? But all of that has to do with demand.”
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