I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, February 11th.

So we're all feeling higher prices on various things in our lives right now, right? Inflation hit another

40-year high, as announced yesterday.

Did you hear that one? Seven and a half percent higher prices on average for the things that they

measure in the consumer price index for the month of January compared to January of last year.

And so we're all deciding what we can still afford and what we can. A healthy eating

friend of mine told me yesterday the breaking point for her on one of her favorite things was to

see pea shoots jump by $5 in the pack that she usually buys them in. She couldn't do it anymore.

Just couldn't justify five more dollars just for a few servings of pea shoots.

But as we're all making decisions about what we can or can't buy, the companies that sell us

stuff are making decisions about what they can or can't charge. Here's Massachusetts

Senator Elizabeth Warren, speaking on MSNBC, after acknowledging that some

inflation is being caused by unavoidable pressures like the cost of supplies and kinks in the supply

chain, but...

There's another part to what's going on, too.

And that is these giant corporations who say, wow, a lot of talk about high prices and

inflation, this is a chance to get in there and not only pass a long cost, but to inflate

prices beyond that and just engage in a little straightforward price gouging. We now live in a time when profit margins are higher than they

have been in 70 years. Two-thirds of the publicly traded companies in this country are seeing

higher profit margins than they did before the pandemic.

Now, your profit margins don't go up just because your costs went up.

They go up because you saw an opportunity and you said, as the chair of the Federal Reserve

...