“It’s idiotic, it’s dangerous and it will never work.”Lord Stuart Rose, former Asda chairman, is outraged that the government has asked supermarkets to cap p...
Inflation is measured annually - food prices have increased roughly 3-4% since one year ago. Your reply indicates you’re thinking about inflation since 2020. And inflation was high during that period, it’s just now gone back down. That doesn’t mean prices have gone back down - that is not only unlikely, but economically dangerous.
Yeah I get that. Apart from the soya milk which was this year, the price rises were not long after Ukraine. So in a short time, my food costs doubled, but my income did not. Even at the time they were saying a number that was a lot lower than the 50% or more that I was experiencing per item.
Inflation numbers are always a summary - whereas we naturally tend to focus on the worst examples. So some products you buy probably didnt go up as much, but that’s harder to remember. Overall, housing costs haven’t gone up nearly as much as food, for example, so your total inflation was likely closer to the headline figures (though I’m specifically talking about food inflation, which sometimes did make the headlines itself)
That brings us to another phenomenon, which is that noone actually buys the exact “basket of goods” that economists use to work out inflation, so your personal rate can be different for that reason as well.
But in the end there was a period of high inflation, which peaked at about 20% year on year, and while wages have grown, they haven’t grown anywhere near as much.
I think this means stories like this one have much more salience because we’re all feeling the pinch due to inflation since 2020, so a low level of inflation now is very worrying.
Inflation is measured annually - food prices have increased roughly 3-4% since one year ago. Your reply indicates you’re thinking about inflation since 2020. And inflation was high during that period, it’s just now gone back down. That doesn’t mean prices have gone back down - that is not only unlikely, but economically dangerous.
Hopefully that clears that up?
Yeah I get that. Apart from the soya milk which was this year, the price rises were not long after Ukraine. So in a short time, my food costs doubled, but my income did not. Even at the time they were saying a number that was a lot lower than the 50% or more that I was experiencing per item.
Inflation numbers are always a summary - whereas we naturally tend to focus on the worst examples. So some products you buy probably didnt go up as much, but that’s harder to remember. Overall, housing costs haven’t gone up nearly as much as food, for example, so your total inflation was likely closer to the headline figures (though I’m specifically talking about food inflation, which sometimes did make the headlines itself)
That brings us to another phenomenon, which is that noone actually buys the exact “basket of goods” that economists use to work out inflation, so your personal rate can be different for that reason as well.
But in the end there was a period of high inflation, which peaked at about 20% year on year, and while wages have grown, they haven’t grown anywhere near as much.
I think this means stories like this one have much more salience because we’re all feeling the pinch due to inflation since 2020, so a low level of inflation now is very worrying.