No End Seen To ECB Hikes As Data Mocks Philip Lane
Last year, inflation in Europe was largely a function of the war and its impact on energy and food prices. That meant runaway price growth was mostly beyond the ECB's capacity to micromanage.
The situation is different in 2023. European natural gas prices are "returning to manageable levels," as the IEA's Director of Energy Markets and Security put it, but inflation has broadened well beyond energy, testing the mettle of monetary policymakers who can no longer claim the problem resides outside
I wonder what are the reasons for food inflation… Is it a drop in Ukrainian/Russian exports? A rise in fertilizer costs? Transportation costs? Labor costs? Margin expansion by actors within the sector? Weather patterns? A bit of everything?
Those issues would need to be addressed differently. Some are probably harder to solve than others…
Agreed. But we’ll see more leeches applied, yet again.
My guess is generally similar combination of causes as US food inflation, maybe differently weighted.
Right. That’s always going to be the case as they’re a limited number of factors influencing food costs. Still, it’d be nice to know which ones? And that’s not me being glib. If you got some ideas/factors I missed or you know for a fact were/are a big component of US food inflation, that’d be interesting.
fertilizers prices, fuel prices, drought, sketchy transport lanes, protectionist policies, bird flu, corporate opportunism.