At that time, Edwards said, inflation was generally being blamed on raw material prices because of the Ukraine war, as well as the labor market, with very few people saying there was profit-driven inflation, but he took a different view: “This is unprecedented.” He pointed out “when unit costs rise, always, unit margins fall, always, in history.” He said that shouldn’t have happened, and the reason it did was because of so much stimulus from the government that “companies could get away with doing it, using [inflation as] cover.”
This period of corporate excess laid the groundwork for severe political instability and public outrage, Edwards argued. Just look at the election in New York, Edwards said, which was all about the cost of living. Zohran Mamdani’s election is “an indication that this still is a big issue.” Edwards agreed “affordability” is a major topic of the moment, along with the U.S. housing market: “It stands out as, like, what’s going on?”
Coming back to his critique of capitalism, Edwards argued Mamdani’s election is “part of the consequence … the corporates, by being excessively greedy, hence ‘greedflation,’ have laid the seeds for their own destruction—and backlash.” Edwards added that “more and more people are identifying corporate excess.”
Speaking about what he called “intergenerational strife,” Edwards said he thinks this is “the first generation where people are not seeing themselves as better off than their parents were.” Everywhere you look in modern capitalism, “young people can’t get on the housing ladder, they see wealth extremely concentrated … it takes the incentivization out of the economy if young people don’t feel they’re participating.”
On the subject of greedflation, Edwards was philosophical but insisted that what happened in 2023 was a mistake. “Okay, I can understand this is capitalism, this is how it works” he said about pursuit of the profit motive, “but if the government doesn’t step in,” then a backlash is bound to happen. Edwards declined to say this was a particularly Democratic or Republican issue, but he said “there’s a reluctance” in American culture to dictate to the corporate sector. At any rate, the consequence of it is “there’s a day of reckoning coming in,” he said.
Edwards concluded there’s a fitting phrase for the dysfunctions of capitalism in the 2020s: “You reap what you sow.”
