By Our Representative The Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad’s (IIM-A’s) Business Inflation Expectations Survey (BIES), which examines the amount of slack in the economy by polling a panel of business leaders about their inflation expectations, has said that while the past five months’ survey had found around four-fifths of the firms reporting ‘much less than or somewhat less than normal’ profit, the latest round in June suggested that profit expectations are beginning to show “early signs of optimism.” Stating that the cost perceptions data indicates “persistence of high-cost pressures”, with over 65% of the participating firms in the survey “perceive significant (over 6%) cost increase for the consecutive four months”, the BIES report, however, said, “Percentage of firms perceiving over 10% cost increase y-o-y has declined sharply. Over 25% of the firms in June 2022 round of the survey perceive that costs have increased very significantly (over 10%) – down from 34% recorded in