“A Good Reality Check”

In both 2023 and 2024, the S&P 500, a market index tracking the 500 largest US-based companies, was up more than 23 percent, according to academic and industry reports. So far this year, even amid tariff threats and widespread business uncertainty, the stock market has climbed to all-time highs.

In fact, as the country has been mired in inflation spikes since the pandemic, corporate profits have skyrocketed. From 2010 to 2019, corporate profits accounted for roughly 14 percent of the total national income. In the fourth quarter of 2024, those profits had increased to more than 16 percent of the nation’s income, according to a Federal Reserve branch study released in April.

Since the pandemic, many experts have warned about the effects of greedflation, which is when corporations engage in “profiteering by hiking their prices at rates much higher than annual inflation rates.” But the corporate press largely downplayed those concerns. The Washington Post called greedflation a “conspiracy theory” on par with conservatives falsely claiming that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin was a cure for COVID-19.

Singer and Abdulkadir’s study identified more than 1,900 business articles on price increases published since the beginning of 2023, which they narrowed down to one hundred articles using a computer algorithm and manual selection. Of this subset, the authors found that reporters increasingly cited outside factors — such as droughts, minimum-wage increases, or plant closures — as reasons why companies raised prices.

For example, a January 2025 Axios article quoted an egg supplier and a market-intelligence company to conclude that bird flu was “causing egg prices to soar to new record high.” The reporter made no mention of the fact that in 2023, the country’s largest egg suppliers were found guilty of reducing egg supply to increase prices.

Even when outlets mentioned the concept of greedflation, the topic was barely covered.

“When they do mention seller behavior, it is often a secondary consideration and even then, it is often portrayed in an innocuous light,” the study states.

Singer pointed to a July 4, 2025, New York Times article about how beef price increases could be tied to drought. The article highlighted that there are 13 percent fewer US beef cattle than in 2019, a development the reporter chalked up to environmental conditions. However, more than halfway through the story, the author mentioned another possible cause: beef purchasers, large and small, have sued major meat processors, alleging price-fixing collusion.

“Meat processors have denied the claims, but settled some suits for tens of millions of dollars, without admitting wrongdoing,” the Times wrote.

That was the extent of the article’s coverage of the alleged price-fixing scheme. There were no quotes or expert analysis on the role that large meat processors play in beef prices — which is a problem, said the authors of the new media study.

“Contacting industry experts referred by the issuers of company press releases should not constitute objective verification for business news pieces,” they wrote. “Speaking with a consumer advocate, labor advocate, or economist without conflicting interests might serve as a good reality check and guide the production of articles with more nuanced discussions of seller’s relationships to price changes.”

The Missing Piece

On August 14, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal agency tasked with monitoring workforce and economic trends, found that inflation rose nearly 1 percent in July, and 3.3 percent over the past year. It was “the largest 12-month increase since rising 3.4 percent in February 2025,” the bureau noted.

The bureau’s report also found that overall food prices rose 4.2 percent from July 2024, with vegetable prices jumping 36.3 percent, beef prices rising 9.9 percent, pork up 4.7 percent, and coffee prices up nearly 30 percent.

According to the new study, outlets largely blamed Trump’s on-and-off tariff announcements for recent price hikes, despite evidence that many companies appear to be using the political upheaval as a smoke screen to increase profits.

What has received less attention are the corporate machinations behind the scenes. For example, Trump’s Justice Department is investigating egg producers for alleged price-fixing schemes, frozen potato companies are being sued for operating as a “cartel,” and a major beef processor agreed to settle a lawsuit earlier this year regarding anticompetitive practices. There’s also growing consolidation in the coffee sector.

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of the antimonopoly-focused BIG newsletter, noted in a recent article that even the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s own data suggested that recent inflation was due in large part to increasing corporate profits.

“The biggest contributor to higher service prices seems to be profit margins,” Stoller wrote in an August 14 column. “The term for margins in the [Producer Price Index report] is called ‘trade services,’ and the [bureau] says over half the increase in service costs ‘is attributable to margins for final demand trade services, which jumped 2.0 percent.’”

Singer added that corporations may see inflation as a good thing, since it can enable them to raise prices.

“Recall that the last bout of inflation coincided with — and was caused in part by — surging profits,” he said. “Companies used COVID as a pretext to hike prices by more than any cost increase.”

The Trump Effect

The inflation spikes come as Trump rolled back a Biden-era executive order this month designed to limit corporate consolidation and subsequent price gouging. The 2021 Biden order “encouraged” the attorney general, the Federal Trade Commission, and other agencies to “enforce the antitrust laws fairly and vigorously,” and directed other agency heads to develop “a plan to continue the effort to combat excessive pricing of prescription drugs and enhance domestic pharmaceutical supply chains,” among other actions.

“Over the last several decades, as industries have consolidated, competition has weakened in too many markets, denying Americans the benefits of an open economy and widening racial, income, and wealth inequality,” Biden wrote in the executive order. “Federal Government inaction has contributed to these problems, with workers, farmers, small businesses, and consumers paying the price.”

The US Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying group in the country, staunchly opposed Biden’s executive order, stating in 2021 that it was “built on the flawed belief that our economy is over-concentrated, stagnant, and fails to generate private investment needed to spur innovation.”

On August 13, Trump revoked the Biden order. The following day, the Chamber praised the move, noting “President Trump has rightfully chosen vigorous competition that entrusts American consumers to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, not more government bureaucracy.”

The Chamber donated $50,000 to Trump’s inauguration and has spent more than $38 million so far this year lobbying Congress, the White House, and regulators on antitrust issues and other matters, disclosures show.

The National Family Farm Coalition, an advocacy group, slammed Trump’s recent action.

“The revocation of this executive order will worsen existing conditions that allow abuses and the consolidation of power by the largest companies to go unchecked at the expense of small businesses, including independent farmers, and their customers,” the organization told Civil Eats.