The supply chain disruptions caused by pandemic lockdowns have been a leading cause of the economic chaos of recent years, feeding the rage of consumers paying sky-high prices for suddenly scarcer goods. But they’ve also been a bonanza for the firms making those goods, who have outright admitted to using the headlines about inflation to tack on added price markups to their products, whether it’s eggs, airplane tickets, or electricity.

Maybe no product has embodied today’s inflationary pressures quite like cars have, as shortages of parts coupled with continuing strong demand for vehicles has sent their prices soaring. While we’ve been told that firms are simply passing along higher production costs to consumers, car dealers have also been making record profits, with Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond president Tom Barkin telling the New York Times that carmakers and dealers had “discovered that a low-volume, higher-price model was actually a very profitable model.” A Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study from this past April determined that dealer markups contributed majorly to inflation in the price of new cars.

This is backed up by the words of the executives of the country’s largest dealerships themselves, who on earnings calls have explicitly talked about selling cars at inflated prices and making a tidy profit. It points to the need for robust government action to provide relief for consumers against such private sector greed.