President Biden regularly tries to blame corporate greed for the skyrocketing prices since he’s been president. He completely ignores the impact of government “greed” in spending and borrowing $4 trillion.

The San Francisco Fed ran the numbers and debunked this oft-repeated theory of corporate price gouging:

An increase in pricing power would be reflected in price-cost markups, leading to higher inflation; likewise, a decline in pricing power and markups could alleviate inflation pressures. We use industry-level measures of markups to trace their evolving impact on inflation during the current expansion.

We find that markups rose substantially in some sectors, such as the motor vehicles industry. However, the aggregate markup across all sectors of the economy, which is more relevant for inflation, has stayed essentially flat during the post-pandemic recovery.

In other words:  it wasn’t corporate greed that caused the highest inflation rate in nearly forty years. As the chart shows, markups were flat as prices rose.