CEO Says He's Been "Praying for Inflation" Because It's an Excuse to Jack Up Prices [View all]

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.

Iron Mountain is a data storage and management company based in Boston with a current market capitalization of $12 billion. According to its website, over 95 percent of the Fortune 1,000 are Iron Mountain customers. The company’s founder originally bought its first site, an exhausted iron mine, to grow mushrooms.

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.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/09/28/inflation-prices-investors-iron-mountain/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23074979-iron-mountain-inc-investor-day-final