Who Broke The Economy?

Today on Lever Time, we unpack how corporations built and then broke the supply chain — and more importantly, how they took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to price gouge everybody else. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt like we ran out of everything: toilet paper, hand sanitizer, microchips, exercise bikes, and more. High demand and supply shortages rocked the economy. Now we know that it was the corporations that did it to themselves.

In his new book How the World Ran out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain, veteran New York Times reporter Peter Goodman who covers the global economy unspools the long and sordid history of how the supply chain went global, then consolidated, and ultimately ended up in the hands of just three companies — creating a complicated and surprising crisis that has unfolded around the world.

Then, as inflation began to set into the economy, corporations saw a huge opportunity to raise prices as consumers grew desperate — and they took it, giving us “greedflation.” In this episode of Lever Time, Goodman and Lindsay Owens, the executive director of The Groundwork Collaborative, sit down with senior podcast producer Arjun Singh to unpack how that gave us inflation.

To read an un-edited transcript of the episode, click here.