{"id":62502,"date":"2022-04-20T19:28:59","date_gmt":"2022-04-21T00:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62502"},"modified":"2022-04-20T19:28:59","modified_gmt":"2022-04-21T00:28:59","slug":"this-time-really-is-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62502","title":{"rendered":"This time really is different"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

This time really is different<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

The UK may have avoided a technical recession \u2013 two successive quarters of negative growth \u2013 in the first half of 2022, but a year from now this will be of little comfort.\u00a0 This is because \u2013 despite the protestations of the US Bidon administration \u2013 the downturn in economic activity in the latest (February) growth figures \u2013 0.1 percent, down from 0.8 percent in January \u2013 has nothing to do with Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.\u00a0 Rather, the decline in economic activity is the result, primarily, of a massive global shortfall in energy, with fossil fuel extraction impaired by the lack of investment during the lockdowns, and with oil down some four million barrels a day from its November 2018 peak.<\/p>\n

Last autumn, these energy shortages translated into painful spikes in prices, which helped fan the flames of a general inflation resulting from broken supply chains and the rapid spending of two-years\u2019 worth of state pandemic handouts \u2013 mostly to corporations and the\u00a0wealthier half of the population<\/a>.\u00a0 Much of the additional demand generated by state spending, however, has already disappeared \u2013 in part due to the additional price of almost everything within the economy at a time when wages are failing to keep up.<\/p>\n

In this, at least, the inflation of the 2020s is very different to its 1970s cousin.\u00a0 In those days, wages were protected by a combination of strong trade unions, governments committed to maintaining full-employment, and financial controls that prevented investor-flight.\u00a0 None of those constraints exists today and are not compensated for by a minimum wage which, if set too high, can only result in fewer jobs.\u00a0 In a few sectors of the economy \u2013 such as HGV haulage last autumn \u2013 market forces have driven up wages.\u00a0 Although even here, employers have preferred to offer golden handshakes rather than an increase in the hourly wage…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This time really is different The UK may have avoided a technical recession \u2013 two successive quarters of negative growth \u2013 in the first half of 2022, but a year from now this will be of little comfort.\u00a0 This is because \u2013 despite the protestations of the US Bidon administration \u2013 the downturn in economic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[32855,328,29428,13351,31360,820,2080],"class_list":["post-62502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","tag-consciousness-of-sheept","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-lockdowns","tag-price-inflation","tag-tim-watkins","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62503,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62502\/revisions\/62503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}