CEO of $12 billion company told investors he’s “praying for inflation”
an unusually candid admission of a dirty secret in the business world: corporations use inflation as a pretext to jack up prices. As corporate profits reach record high, Iron Mountain executive tells Wall Street inflation is great for “the bottom line”
The CEO of Iron Mountain Inc. told Wall Street analysts at a September 20 investor event that the high levels of inflation of the past several years had helped the company increase its margins — and that for that reason he had long been “doing my inflation dance praying for inflation.”
The comment is an unusually candid admission of a dirty secret in the business world: corporations use inflation as a pretext to hike prices. “Corporations are using those increasing costs – of materials, components and labor – as excuses to increase their prices even higher, resulting in bigger profits,” Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, recently argued. Corporate profits are now at their highest level since 1950.
It wasn’t a one-off comment by the Iron Mountain CEO, William Meaney. On a 2018 earnings call, he invoked a Native American ritual, telling participants that “it’s kind of like a rain dance, I pray for inflation every day I come to work because … our top line is really driven by inflation. … Every point of inflation expands our margins.”
JOE BIDEN @POTUS DOES A 180
POTUS quietly changed that language. The guidance now says, “As of Sept. 29, 2022, borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED cannot obtain one-time debt relief by consolidating those loans into Direct Loans.”
In a reversal, the Education Dept. is excluding millions from student loan relief
It’s unclear why the department reversed its decision on allowing FFEL borrowers with commercially-held loans to consolidate and then qualify for debt relief.
In a remarkable reversal that will affect the fortunes of millions of student loan borrowers, the U.S. Department of Education has quietly changed its guidance around who qualifies for President Biden’s sweeping student debt relief plan.
At the center of the change are borrowers who took out federal student loans many years ago, both Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans. FFEL loans, issued and managed by private banks but guaranteed by the federal government, were once the mainstay of the federal student loan program until the FFEL program ended in 2010.
Today, according to federal data, more than 4 million borrowers still have commercially-held FFEL loans. Until Thursday, the department’s own website advised these borrowers that they could consolidate these loans into federal Direct Loans and thereby qualify for relief under Biden’s debt cancellation program.