Single family used to act as a check on greed. Careless institutional investment was limited to multi family. They couldn’t push multi family rents beyond single family. Once institutional got into single family, everything became uncapped. It’s harder for millions of small landlords competing for tenants to act as a cartel than it is for a few large landlords taking up marginal supply.
Google was literally declared a monopoly by a court recently. Facebook and Apple both are oligopolies or monopolies in certain market segments. Apple has a monopoly on app store and on device payments. These things are bad enough that they’re being litigated.
But those extra dollars aren’t with consumers. Otherwise, yes. That’s where the money supply causes inflation argument falls apart — at least for this case.
More like the shenanigans aren’t new and can move up and down. And there’s coordination between the segments in the chain. How is it that farmers are making less than ever before but the products are more expensive than ever before? Look at spot prices for food commodities like corn going back a decade or two. The price is flat. Why are prices of goods up? Why are companies now less efficient instead of more efficient? There are plenty of ways that middle men bloat costs. Profit margins are after expenses. Load up a company with debt. Sell all the real estate and pay rent. Bloat executive salaries. Play games with shell companies and other middlemen. It’s not rocket science.
There are many but off the top of my head Kroger buying Safeway. Visa buying Plaid. Nvidia buying Arm. Didn't they block a cell phone merger? A mattress merger?
Because there is collusion in the supply chain as well. The grocery stores won’t place your product, the distributors won’t distribute it or will charge you more, the farmers will charge you more. This is why horizontal and vertical consolidation were made illegal a century ago. Anti-competitive behavior has to be policed at every level.
Margins aren’t an objective measurement. Margins are easy to manipulate through shell companies and other costs.
Just look at PBMs. They all supposedly have small margins. However, once you peel back the layers, you see rebates and kickbacks and all kinds of illegal schemes to hide the real income.