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Fuel pump: Petrol has become significantly more expensive - but why is that?
Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa
Anyone who is currently booking a trip knows what we're talking about.
Who needs wood for the hut, too.
When it comes to refueling, the numbers have been turning faster since January.
The prices increase.
Officially measured, inflation is 2.5 percent.
What used to be common, but has not been there for years.
Not funny at all, of course. And yet one thing is somehow noticeable: how quickly and loudly all those are there again in these weeks who are pregnant with meaning that "inflation is back" - as in the horror film - and accompany it with conspicuously linguistic and dramaturgical excellence: with ghost and Scourge. And that that affects the poor most of all. "Of all the social grievances", inflation is "the most serious", says one of the Trulla experts who are rampant in Germany and whose hearts usually beat for the financially upscale. Steep thesis.
Indeed, the same people don't seem quite as eager when it comes to, say, the poor earning too little - or that there is still child poverty.
At least then there is less talk of ghost and scourge.
Coincidence?
Or agenda?
After all, the talk of the specter of inflation has already contributed to a major paradigm shift - one that benefited the rich rather than the poor.
Of course, you never really know what's coming.
This is why there is always a warning against prices that will continue to rise more sharply.
But, according to more serious assessments, there is currently quite a lot against it.
For example, almost anything that is causing prices to rise right now falls into the category of temporary factors, such as:
the increase in VAT in January after a six-month reduction;
the worldwide soaring of commodity prices, as a reaction to sudden pent-up demand and bottlenecks after the lockdown - in part simply compensation for the crash of last year;
the introduction of a CO2 tax in Germany;
the pent-up travel demand after a pandemic of more than a year;
and the statistical base effect, which simply results from the fact that VAT was reduced in mid-2020 - which will lead to even higher inflation rates in the middle of this year, purely arithmetically.
Even assuming that CO2 prices will continue to rise, that's not what economists mean by inflation, with all sorts of prices in the country rocketing upwards. The factors mentioned have little to do with the supposedly bad monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). House prices are also rising in the USA - although interest rates are already significantly higher there.
Above all, it would not be the first time that the big inflation prophets were completely wrong.
On the contrary: Since the 1980s, false prognoses have persisted when the inflation rate increases a little more for a while - mostly due to swings in the global commodity markets or tax surcharges.
The forecast permanently higher inflation rates did not materialize again and again.
On an annual average, prices have risen significantly less in the decades since then than we did in the days of the holy Deutsche Bundesbank.
The shock 45 years ago
According to the diagnosis of the two British economists Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, there is much to suggest that the inflation of the 1970s was in fact a historical exception. Which raises the question of why that is so - and why so many people try to scourge and ghost again with every temporary price surge. Mostly with reference to the bad seventies and early eighties. There are researchers at institutes who have been predicting accelerated inflation every six months since then. In vain.
There could be a historical phenomenon behind this: The shock that inflation brought with it around 45 years ago made a decisive contribution to the great ideological change at the time - towards a strongly conservative economic world view, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the first to see at the time USA and Great Britain implement. This ideological cut was to shape many things for years: from the smashing of trade unions (because their demands had accelerated inflation) to the dismantling of regulation on the labor market (which also contributed to severely dampened wage growth) to the privatization of former state services (because that should also work through increased competition against surcharges).
The same logic includes opening borders as unlimited as possible, keyword: globalization - because that too increases competitive pressure.
This too could be emphasized with reference to the (otherwise recurring) scourge.
Since then, the Bundesbank and the ECB have also been calibrated and obliged to ensure stable prices - no matter what the cost.
In case of doubt, even high unemployment had a positive effect - because that also left the pressure not to demand higher wages.
Setting priorities.
Unbearably high human price
If that's true, it could explain what has happened since then. If there was no such lasting danger of inflation, but so zealous efforts were made to stop any price and wage increases, it is no wonder that at some point deflation became more of a risk than inflation - and that the inflation forecasts never came to fruition .
Then, conversely, that could explain a lot of the other problems we have today: that the gap between rich and poor has widened so dramatically, especially in the hardcore countries USA and Great Britain. Or that due to sheer hyper-globalization and cheap competition, numerous regions in the industrialized countries have collapsed - which has promoted populism. And why the central banks are still clinging to the old dogma, according to which they are basically only responsible for price stability anyway - although in reality they could also contribute much more to solving other problems, whether to save the climate or to reduce the inequality that leads to According to recent studies, they keep contributing to their bond purchases in the (anyway rather rich) financial markets.
If that is true, it is grotesquely or deliberately damaging to prophesy the return of the alleged scourge with every rise in the inflation rate - with the accompanying daydream of relaunching the orthodox-conservative agenda and era in which prices have not been as stable as they have been for a long time stayed, but this came at an unbearably high human price. Then it would be desirable for the situation to shift - and for it to become normal again for everyone to see something that can be counted from economic progress. Not just top earners and shareholders. Just as Joe Biden is already trying to practice in the USA, in which he has set the re-strengthening of trade unions as a major item on the agenda.
In a dynamic economy, successful companies sometimes have to be able to raise their prices.
Just as it is part of a functioning society that as many as possible win instead of falling behind.
Then the prices just go up.
If that leads to moderate inflation, it is a blessing, not a scourge.
Then it is important to find the right amount.
We are probably still a long way from this blessing if the surcharges are more due to special effects than to permanent changes in the balance of power.
That would have to change more of what Reaganomics and Thatcherism did socially and economically 40 years ago.
So long the scourge is more of de- than inflation.
As much as the ghost experts from olden times moan.
Beware, inflation scammers.