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Payment process at the supermarket checkout: Is everything getting more expensive?
Photo: AP
In the horror film they rise from their graves at night, with grotesquely distorted limbs, staring gaze and always looking for fresh human flesh.
Zombies are apparently dead, nobody is expecting them, but when they suddenly appear, they terrify the living.
The economy's most prominent undead is inflation.
For more than a generation it has all but disappeared from the reality of developed economies.
Yet their rebirth is foretold with beautiful regularity.
It was the introduction of the euro in the late 1990s that haunted the ghost again.
After the financial crisis, the trillion dollar cheap money programs of the central banks led to the fear of price surges being avoided.
The only problem was: the predictions turned out to be wrong every time.
Will it turn out differently this time?
Since the central banks were throwing money around during the pandemic as if there was no tomorrow, the topic has been booming again.
The London Economist recently devoted a cover story to the phenomenon.
Anglo-Saxon economists, who used to mock the inflation whispers of their German colleagues as an expression of "German fear", suddenly take the worries seriously.
And Hans-Werner Sinn, the former head of the Munich Ifo Institute, recently recalled the great horror in a lecture on the inflation debate: the German hyperinflation of the 1920s.
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