2023-04-22 04:45:10
This supermarket manager still can’t believe it. “When I think a soda merchant came to us with a request for a 25% raise. But it’s only water and syrup! » He is not the only one to be strangled, at the moment, in the face of the waltz in food prices which continues on the shelves of grocery stores. Even the government has decided to lecture the industry in the sector, contrary to its previous behavior.
No more bad distributors facing nice industrialists, now it is the latter who are in the crosshairs. And they are not alone. Since the fall of 2022, everywhere in Europe and the United States, we have seen an explosion in the profits of large companies. The latest results of the CAC 40 bear witness to this.
Not only are sales rising, following the rise in prices, but profits are jumping well beyond that, and practically in all sectors. From electronic chips from STMicroelectronics, whose turnover increased by 26% but profits by 100%, to L’Oréal shampoos and its 24% increase in net profit for 18% increase in sales, passing by EssilorLuxottica glasses and lenses, whose profits have climbed by 50%, not to mention car manufacturers, such as Stellantis, whose sales have jumped by 20% but profits by 26% compared to a year 2021 when they were already very good.
Spectacular reversal
Strange situation all the same, while the spectacular rise in inflation, due to the extraordinary rise in the prices of energy and raw materials, should, logically, have cut into corporate profits. Hence the emergence of a suspicion. Would companies not have taken advantage of the situation to improve their accounts well beyond catching up with the rise in their production costs? In which case they would contribute to fueling the rise in prices.
This famous deadly spiral of inflation which leads central bankers to have to slow down the economy, even to plunge it into recession and unemployment to curb this process of generalized impoverishment.
It was the chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), Irishman Philip Lane, who sounded the alarm during a reading at Trinity College in Dublin on 6 March. He explains there calmly and with force curves and graphs that, for once, the current driving force of inflation is not the wages, the usual suspect, but the margins of the companies. And in a significant proportion.
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