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The question of what a liter of gasoline costs was the last thing Olaf Scholz got into trouble.
The SPD chancellor candidate's answer "I'm not going to refuel myself" in the "Bild" interview was later interpreted as being lifted.
In view of the inflation at the gas pump, however, one could blame Scholz for the fact that it is not that easy to keep track of things.
1.50 euros or 1.60 euros for a liter of Super are no longer unusual even off the highway.
The high fuel prices, together with heating oil, are the main drivers of inflation.
In June, consumer prices were 2.3 percent higher than a year earlier, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Tuesday.
The detailed official figures follow a few weeks later.
But the figures for May and more recent estimates by industry experts also show which products prices rose particularly significantly in the past year.
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The data shows: Not only has energy become more expensive, consumers have to pay significantly more for other products as well.
This is partly due to the corona crisis, in which e-bikes and bicycles boomed as well as flowers and plants.
Services cost 1.6 percent more.
However, other price increases are difficult to pin down and have very different reasons - for example in the food sector. The prices for food raw materials have recently risen sharply worldwide. The index of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) climbed by almost 40 percent, so fats in particular have become noticeably more expensive. This situation can become stressful in poorer countries, where people spend more of their income on food.
This is less noticeable in this country.
This is mainly due to the fact that the more expensive groceries in the German shopping basket, on which the inflation calculations of the Federal Statistical Office are based, play a significantly smaller role.
In addition, other foods, such as vegetables, have hardly become more expensive.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, food was 1.2 percent more expensive in June than in the same month last year.
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But there are differences, as Thomas Els, market analyst at the Agricultural Market Information Society reports. While
fruit
and
vegetables
were sometimes significantly more expensive in the spring, prices here have now stabilized overall. The months in which ten euros per kilo of paprika were due in the supermarket because of the wet and cold spring are over. Els expects the price of fruit and vegetables to rise by just 0.5 percent in June.
The prices for
bread
and
rolls
are clearly in the plus.
The AMI estimates price increases of four percent for June.
One reason here could also be higher energy costs.
The grain prices, on the other hand, often cited by producers and traders, are only responsible for a small part of the inflation, according to the Göttingen agricultural economist Achim Spiller.
In the case of cereal products, the share of farmers in consumer spending is below ten percent, explains Spiller.
"Roll prices can therefore hardly be explained by the fluctuations in global wheat prices, but rather have something to do with the corona-related additional costs of bakeries." Sometimes companies also tried to use the price fluctuations as a reason for price increases.
The example of
strawberries
shows how deceptive the rate of price increases can be compared to the previous year
.
According to AMI, the price level here in June 2021 is even slightly below that of the previous year.
However, the prices for strawberries in June 2020 were also around a third higher than in June 2019. The main reason for this is the expensive use of harvest workers during the pandemic.
Even
coffee
is recently become more expensive in many places.
Industry giant Tchibo recently announced price increases of just under one euro per pound, the International Coffee Organization spoke of a price rally amid an expected decline in production.
With the economic recovery after the pandemic, the demand for fuel for offices is rising again, at the same time there are road and port blockades in the important production country Colombia and drought is causing the harvest in Brazil to shrink.
The popular Arabica beans in particular are therefore expensive.
Despite these isolated increases in energy and food, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann warns of an exaggerated fear of inflation.
"Many people worry that inflation could return with the economic recovery," Weidmann said at a bank conference at the beginning of the week.
He takes that very seriously.
"But the dangers of inflation should not be exaggerated in the discussion."
Silke Tober from the union-affiliated Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) also advises calm: "Such price surges would only lead to inflation in the true sense of the word if, as a second-round effect, they lead to wage increases and set a price-wage spiral in motion." In the first quarter of 2021, collectively agreed wages in Germany rose at the same rate as inflation.
Either way, the inflation rate is likely to be even higher from July: the year before, VAT was temporarily reduced - an effect that will now be clearly noticeable.
apr
