 What is causing today's spike in inflation? There's actually an interesting analytical way to look at this. The price of basically everything in the US economy can be divided into three components of costs. Those three components are labor costs, like wages and benefits, non-labor costs, like equipment, materials, and corporate profits. So you can basically look at any period and see how much of inflation or price growth over that period was due to each of those three components. And when you look over the recovery, what you find is that corporate profit increases explain 40% of the rise in prices in this recovery. That is about three times higher than usual. So what that means is that when you are doing your shopping and you see prices that are really, really high, you can know that a key driver of that is corporations exploiting a war, exploiting a pandemic to line their own pockets.