As always, my hon. Friend makes an important point. I will come on to that in the remaining passages of my speech, because people out there are really feeling in their day-to-day lives the consequences of this greedflation and the opportunistic pushing up of prices by so many companies.
In the United States, an Economic Policy Institute study found:
“Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation”,
and that
“over half of this increase…can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal.”
Let us take a moment to note that a broad range of officials at UBS, Unite the union, Goldman Sachs, the ECB and the US Economic Policy Institute are all suggesting that over half of the current price mark-up is to do with profiteering.