The weird ways companies are coping with inflation

INFLATION IS MAKING up for lost time. A word that many thought had gone the way of peroxide hair and trench coats in the early 1980s is now back on almost every CEO’s lips as they run through a barrage of compounding shocks—war, commodity crisis, supply-chain disruption and labour shortages—in their companies’ first-quarter results. From December to March, almost three-quarters of firms in the S&P 500 mentioned inflation in earnings calls, according to FactSet, a data gatherer. Such is the novelty, it runs the risk of making such turgid occasions almost riveting.