Corporate Windfall Profits Surge to $1 Trillion a Year… - Common Dreams
An analysis released Thursday shows that 722 of the world’s top corporations made combined windfall profits of $1 trillion per year in 2021 and 2022 as people across the planet struggled to meet basic needs due to the price hikes that businesses have used to pad their bottom lines.
The humanitarian groups Oxfam and ActionAid found that the companies raked in $1.09 trillion in windfall profits—defined as profits significantly above a given corporation’s average—in 2021 and $1.1 trillion last year.
That’s an 89% increase in total profits compared to the average between 2017 and 2020, according to Oxfam and ActionAid’s analysis of Forbes’ “Global 2000” ranking of the world’s largest companies—a major windfall during a period in which extreme poverty and global hunger surged.
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The windfall profits of leading food and beverage companies in 2021 and 2022 would be “enough to cover the $6.4 billion funding gap needed to deliver life-saving food assistance in East Africa more than twice over,” Oxfam and ActionAid noted.
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Last month, IMF economists estimated that “rising corporate profits account for almost half the increase in Europe’s inflation over the past two years as companies increased prices by more than spiking costs of imported energy.”
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