Global Inflation Shock: High Prices, No Matter the Government | Quick Take | GZERO Media

Описание: Governments may not have a lot of fiscal firepower left to fight a global recession.

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Today, Ian Bremmer talks about inflation:

Why inflation? Well, because I posted something on Twitter that sort of exploded over the course of the last couple of days, which means people are clearly interested. And I'll tell you what the tweet was, I'll show you a little post here. It said, "US: left government, high inflation. UK: right government, high inflation. Germany: centrist government, high inflation. Italy: everyone in government, high inflation. Wild guess, it's not the government." Now of course, it is government in part, but it's not the government, which is the point. In other words, no matter who you decide to elect, if it was Trump, or Biden, or Merkel, or Scholz, or Johnson, or Starmer, or Bolsonaro, or Lula, you are getting high inflation, you're getting high inflation globally. And I'll talk about why that is.

Now, a lot of people went nuts and said, "How can you call the US government left?" And certainly, from a global perspective, the entire US political spectrum is kind of on the right. And from the European perspective, you wouldn't call Biden a leftist, you'd call him a centrist. You might even call him center-right? Of course, Fox News on Primetime calls Biden and the Democrats a bunch of socialists. And if I said that the US was a left government, I mean a right government, then everybody in the US explodes, so it just shows how divided and screwed up everybody generally is anyway. But leaving that all aside, the point is the point. And it's an important point, which is that we are so divided in the United States and globally that when something that really upsets us happens that we haven't seen in over a generation, which is persistent levels of very high inflation, we get really angry, and we want to blame the government and blame the government hard.

And the reality is that no matter what your government looks like, you're dealing with very high inflation. Let's be clear, this is a global inflation shock. The economic disruption hit everybody. First with the pandemic because COVID destroyed global supply chains seized up the global economy. And then after that, you've got China's zero-COVID, just as you think you're coming out, the United States, the Europeans vaxxed, and relaxed, unmasked and going out, and going about our business and the Chinese locking down Shanghai and Beijing and some of their most important ports. And we still get so many of our goods, especially the low-cost ones from China. So, that hits you with greater supply chain risk. And then on top of that, the war, the Russians invading Ukraine, leading to massive disruptions in energy, massive disruptions in food and fertilizer, all of that is increasing prices.

Now, in response to those shocks, and those are shocks that are frankly of unprecedented scope in the context of the last couple of decades, so you would expect massive inflation just on the basis of that. But on top of that, governments met the shocks with a flood of money, and of fiscal spending, and it worked. And as a consequence, you ended up with massive demand that fell on shrinkings and disrupted supply. Now this shock is being felt very differently in different regions around the world.

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