Companies are paying higher wages, spending more for materials and absorbing record freight costs, pushing up economic inflation gauges. They are also reporting some of their best profitability in years, the Wall Street Journal reported. Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses, after decades of grinding down costs and prices. Industries from retail and manufacturing to biotech have seen their profits rise. Other industries, largely those still climbing out of pandemic lockdowns, such as travel, or those too weighted with inflationary costs, have raised prices but not experienced a profit boost. Nearly two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies have reported fatter profit margins so far this year than they did over the same stretch of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak, data from FactSet show. Nearly 100 of these giants have booked 2021 profit margins — the share of each dollar of sales a company can pocket — that are at least 50% above 2019 levels.
