The Rise of the Greedconomy

Want to Know Why Your Wallet’s Hurting? Profiteering — On a Dying Planet.

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Take a hard look at the chart above. If it doesn’t take your breath away…it should. My job, unfortunately, is to warn. To break bad news. More of the time than I’d like, in this dystopian age. Some charts are just charts — some tell stories, of whole era. The chart above? It’s one of those.

You’ve felt the pain. The groan-inducing way your wallet bursts open whenever you have to…pay for stuff these days. Basics. How fast is the price of food…still…rising? Upwards of 10%, by some estimates. The elemental necessities are skyrocketing upwards. That’s not just because of the war in Ukraine, it’s not because of Covid, which is no longer, rightly or wrongly, a public health emergency — it’s because, at this point, of climate change. We’ll come back to that. First, the point. One of the great, dismal trends of this age is going to be profiteering — on an historic, jaw-dropping scale.

If you think I exaggerate, well, like I said, take a hard look at the chart above. You’ve felt the pain. But for corporate profits? Times have never been better. Literally. What was Covid, for mega-corporations? The greatest opportunity to profiteer in modern history.

Let me put that in perspective, and prove it. See the first really big hump in the chart? Around 2000 or so? That’s the dot com boom. In that era, corporate profits leapt upwards. In that age, there was an argument, too, for them, too: the rise of the internet unlocked efficiencies. It made all our lives easier, in many ways. What once took reams of paperwork could now be done with a click, ultimately, on your phone. Sure, the dot com boom was followed by an epic crash — you can see that on the chart, too.

During Covid, corporate profits leapt upwards by as much or more as the dot com boom. LOL. You should be able to see what’s wrong with this picture. The dot com boom was a classic story of technological progress. Covid was a pandemic. Big difference. Profits rising because of technology and efficiencies — debatable, at least. But profits soaring that much, again, during a pandemic? That, my friends, is pretty obviously profiteering.

Covid’s “over.” I don’t mean that in the fools’ sense that too many of our leaders do. It hasn’t really gone much of anywhere, every time you get it, yes, you risk serious, cumulative organ damage. Still, as an economic shock, it’s long gone. Nobody’s locked down anymore, supply chains are more or less back to “normal,” and people are out there spending money again. And yet prices, as we all know, are still stratospheric. When I say stratospheric, I mean it.

We seem to have accepted, most of us, mega-inflation, without much of a complaint or a whimper. So much else is going wrong. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. And yet what the chart above shows me — as it should show any good economist — is that our economies, and our leaders, are getting all this badly, badly wrong. It shouldn’t be OK to profiteer on top of…

What was Covid, really? It wasn’t just a random event. It was linked, of course, to climate change. Zoonotic flow increases. Animals — poor things — are fleeing, remarkably, en masse, to the poles, running from the heat. As they do, they rub shoulders with us, as their habitats shrink, they try to live in ours, and the result is zoonotic flow increasing. Covid’s just the first of pandemics to come, thanks to climate change. It’s the first of shocks to come. It gives us some sense of how powerful and dangerous climate change really is.

Many of the other shocks that climate change has in store for us will happen in slightly slower motion. To our mayfly human eyes, anyways. The world won’t suddenly change, like it did, overnight, during Covid. It’ll change over a decade or two. Megafires will make regions and state incapable of supporting agriculture. Rivers will dry up. Reservoirs, too. Crops will fail. Megaweather will put a strain on distribution. Factories, which depend on all the above, will struggle. Prices will rise. I put all that in the past tense, but it’s already happening.

Slow-motion shocks. The greatest shock in human history. We’ve hit the limits of what the planet can provide. Covid was a sudden shock — but the scale and scope of the others will easily rival, and then dwarf it. What happens, for example, as the Antarctic Ocean current slows down? We don’t know, exactly, but it’s not going to be good. What happens this summer — when last summer, crop yields were already down by double digits? How much longer do we pretend there’s no economic effect of all this?

You see, there already is. There are already three economic effects of climate change, which we’re ignoring, resolutely, probably because, well, everything else is going wrong, and it’s easier to be hypnotized by the spectacle of Trump doing a perp walk, or fascists banning books at schools, and so forth. Those three effects, though, go like this. Prices rise. Corporations profiteer. And our economies go haywire.

When most economists look at the economy these days, they’re baffled. Corporate profits are booming! Everything’s great, right? Wrong. Real incomes are plummeting. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a relationship. It’s perfectly fine for profits to rise if incomes, too, are going up — the wealth is shared. But when, LOL, has that happened, in the last few decades? Mostly, what’s happened is that profits rise, while incomes stagnate. And right now, that situation has suddenly undergone a phase shift, and gotten worse. Now, profits are skyrocketing, while real incomes are plummeting.

In other words, the pain you feel at the cash register, when you’re paying these new, shocking, scandalous, bizarre, outsized prices for everything — $20 for a sandwich, $7 for coffee, $5 for a cookie — is real. Most of us suspect there’s something very wrong with this, and we’re right. Those prices are going straight to pad corporate bottom lines. If incomes were rising in tandem — OK, arguable. But when incomes are plummeting because prices are skyrocketing? Something is going very, very wrong.