Juan Pedro Marín-Arrese | Blaming Putin for the current inflationary bout no longer holds. No one disputes that sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy following the aggression on Ukraine have made the prices of vital commodities skyrocket, mainly due to wild speculative movements. Nowadays, we are witnessing sharp falls in raw materials while prices gather further momentum. Thus, claiming we only face a cost shock from such products seems…
The CPI shot up 1.5 points in June, closing at a year-on-year rate of 10.2%, according to the INE’s leading indicator. This is the highest inflation in 37 years, since 1985, surpassing both the 8.7% figure recorded in May and the previous high of 9.8% in March. Gasoline and food products were responsible for the rise in prices, according to the INE, which, as this is a first estimate, does…
The package of measures – valued at 9 billion euros and approved last Saturday by Pedro Sánchez’s government – to contain the impact of the inflationary spiral, comes into force today. The Royal Decree, with measures ranging from pensions to the butane cylinder, electricity generation and the gas market, was published in the BOE yesterday, Sunday. This was just hours after being announced by the Prime Minister following an extraordinary…
Eurostat | The euro area annual inflation rate was 7.4% in April 2022, stable compared to March. A year earlier, the rate was 1.6%. European Union annual inflation was 8.1% in April 2022, up from 7.8% in March. A year earlier, the rate was 2.0%. These figures are published by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. The lowest annual rates were registered in France, Malta (both 5.4%) and…
Simon Harvey, Head of FX Market Analysis at Monex Europe | On the one hand, core inflation moderated in March with a sequential slowdown from 0.5% m-o-m to 0.3% m-o-m, while on the other hand, headline inflation beat expectations. Headline inflation rose by 1.2% month-on-month, in line with expectations, while the annualised rate exceeded expectations by 0.1 percentage point to 8.5%. The slowdown in the month-on-month core CPI to the…
Miguel Navascués | Although there seems to be no awareness of it, the current problem in the world economy is of cosmic proportions, a problem for which we have no close antecedents. We have huge pockets of liquidity, originated to alleviate the contraction of the pandemic, now that inflation is rebounding with great vigour, and a recession that is already being announced in some indicators; what some translate as an…
It is true that there are economies in the eurozone with greater problems than Spain’s and whose prices are much higher, such as the three Baltic republics – Lithuania (13.9%), Estonia (12.4%) and Latvia (8.9%) – as well as Belgium (9.6%) and Slovakia (8.2%). But the rest are on a par… or below. In Germany, year-on-year inflation is already at 7.3% after rising 2.2 points from February. It is the…
Fernando González Urbaneja | The CPI for March (+3%), which raises the year-on-year rate to 9.8%, is an outstanding fact, a major one, enough to stop the machines and turn to Saint Ignatius and his existential questions: where are we and where are we going? The cold data, released by the INE, coincides with the presentation in Congress of the urgent shock measures adapted by the government to deal with…
Fernando González Urbaneja | The risk of inflation which last autumn seemed temporary, caused by a temporary rise in energy prices, has become systemic. And the longer-term and worrying consequences threaten stagflation (inflation without growth and with unemployment). Economic textbooks warn that inflation is a monetary phenomenon that can be cured with monetary policy, with restrictions in the form of interest rate rises and a reduction in the money supply….
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) has shot up by 7.4%, the biggest rise since July 1989, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE) on Monday, which will have to be confirmed in two weeks’ time. Inflation is driven, as has been the case for months, by the price of energy, but it is already spreading to the rest of the goods and services in the consumer basket. In fact, core…