There's no evidence that greed is causing inflation.
reason.com/video
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Earlier this year, dictionary.com added the word "greedflation" to its list of actual words, which it defines as, "a rise in prices, rents, or the like, that is not due to market pressure or any other factor organic to the economy, but is caused by corporate executives or boards of directors, property owners, etc., solely to increase profits that are already healthy or excessive."
A nonprofit called Groundwork Collaborative, with the mission of driving "policy change with credibility, expertise, and impact," claimed credit for helping push "greedflation" into the common political parlance. They might be right. The group authored a widely cited study that purports to show how outsized corporate profits have caused rising prices. And the paper is just as economically illiterate as the concept of "greedflation" at its core. The authors misrepresented and cherry-picked data, and they misunderstood the meaning of a key economic indicator. 
This study, which the Cato Institute's Ryan Bourne has also written about critically, was co-authored by Liz Pancotti and Groundwork Collaborative's Executive Director Lindsay Owens. They found that "prices for consumers have risen by 3.4 percent over the past year" while "input costs for producers have risen by just 1 percent." This is supposedly evidence that corporations are "exploiting their pricing power" to drive up the cost of goods and services. 
Owens and Pancotti misrepresented the data by cherry-picking one year, but it doesn't matter either way for the point that they were trying to make. That's because they also misunderstood the meaning of the Producer Price Index. It measures the prices at which producers sell their products to wholesalers; it doesn't measure input costs, or what companies spend making their products. It's a price index, not a cost index. So comparing it to the Consumer Price Index tells us nothing about corporate profit or "greedflation."
Owens and Pancotti included additional evidence to support their claim. They claimed "that corporate profits drove 53 percent of inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023." By analogy, that means that if the price of a can of chili went up by a dollar, the company spent 47 cents of that extra income paying workers, raising cows, tomatoes, beans, and so on, leaving a whopping 53 cents in pure profit—an example of "greedflation."
Again, Owens and Pancotti cherry-picked a specific time period to get a headline-grabbing result. 
Politicians and activists claim that corporate profits are causing inflation, but the real story is that inflation is creating mostly fictitious accounting profits and tax headaches for corporations. Overall, corporate profits remain pretty stable as a share of domestic income.
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