As winter gives way to spring, many changes are afoot: birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, and influential and powerful people are finally acknowledging that corporate profiteering is playing a role in inflation.

From the start, left-leaning economists, news outlets, and politicians have argued that corporate price gouging has spurred our current cost-of-living problems — that firms weren’t just passing on their own higher costs to consumers, but using the many headlines about inflation to mark up prices more than necessary and quietly make a tidy profit. This was largely dismissed by establishment voices as a left-wing excuse to bash corporations, even as corporate profits soared to record levels and executives explicitly told investors that this is exactly what they were doing.

But as is so often the case, what was once a supposedly fringe, kooky left-wing position is now being recognized as reality. Take last month’s testimony from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, if workers’ wages and benefits could keep growing steadily in a scenario where inflation was tamed and corporate profits fell, Powell replied that this was possible “in the shorter term.” It was a major admission: Powell’s anti-inflation strategy has been explicitly to “get wages down,” yet here he was saying that wages could keep growing if the country was to get out of its inflation woes — as long as the current sky-high corporate profits took a hit.