Last Friday, at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed chair Jerome Powell said that the Fed must continue to raise interest rates, even though it will “bring some pain to households and businesses.”

This is nuts.

True, inflation is near a four-decade high. But the Fed’s aggressive effort to tame it through steep interest rate hikes — the fastest series of rate hikes since the early 1980s — is raising the risk of recession. The pain is already being felt across the land, particularly among lower-income Americans.

Meanwhile, corporate profits continue to grow. Profit margins are at their highest since 1950, according to Commerce Department figures published Thursday.*

In other words, the prices charged by businesses are outpacing the increased costs businesses are facing for production and labor. Which means the biggest single source of inflation in the United States is the pricing power of corporations.

The Fed is raising interest rates because, to paraphrase the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an interest rate. But this puts most of the burden of fighting inflation on average working people and the poor, who are the first to lose pay and jobs as the economy slows. They’re the ones who’ll get hammered.

Why can’t we put the burden where it belongs — on big corporations that continue to raise prices in pursuit of even larger profit margins? Because big corporations have so much political clout that they’d never allow windfall profits taxes or price controls. Not even a Democratic president and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress is able or willing to take on these corporate interests.

Remember this the next time your Uncle Bob says the game is rigged against him and other average people, so he’s holding his nose to support a gonzo Republican candidate who promises to take on the “elites.”

• Technical notes: Across the economy, after-tax profits as a share of gross value added for non-financial corporations, a measure of aggregate profit margins, improved in the second quarter to 15.5% — the most since 1950 — from 14% in the first quarter. Adjusted pretax corporate profits increased 6.1% in the April-to-June period from the prior quarter — the fastest pace in a year — after falling 2.2% in the first three months of the year.

Profits are up 8.1% from a year earlier. While companies report individual profits based on historical costs, the government adjusts the figures to reflect the current cost of replacing capital stock such as equipment and structures. Due to surging inflation, the current replacement costs are much higher. Excluding that adjustment, as well as one for inventory valuation, after-tax profits climbed 10.4% in the second quarter.