[ramraj07]

Corporations didn't suddenly become greedy, they didn't realise that they could be this greedy and get away with it. Typically the market forces that would keep such price gouging in control is competition i.e. if you increase prices a competitor could cut you short and gain market. The pandemic allowed everyone to raise prices and now they played chicken to see who can keep the prices high for longer, only to realise they can not only keep prices high but keep jacking it further and everyone implicitly will do it in unison (or perhaps they had a secret cabal meeting agreeing to it).

We give these CEOs too much credit. The vast majority of them aren't that smart. They clearly realised this is possible, I doubt they have thought about the long term implications to their own bottom line. I suppose they really don't care either.

It'll be interesting to see how the market corrects itself. Everyone's selling good for insane profits, shouldn't that mean there's opportunity for an enterprising person to come in and disrupt that? Only time will tell.

[kennethh]

In mye MBA studies the teacher for accounting had done research on return of equity (ROE) and it showed over time 10+ year for all Norwegian companies it stuck around 9.3% If something become very profitable then many companies should start to target that marked and the profit should be less over time. It is reasonable to think the same thing should happen now.

[pydry]

Unless market consolidation has reached a sufficiently high threshold.

[prepend]

Is there a significant change in market consolidation across all areas in the past 3 years?

Were M&A higher more recently?

It seems odd to me that market consolidation happened in all areas of the CPI and it’s happening at the same time as extremely high money supply is just a coincidence.