Accept your poverty or you will get poorer
A recent Columbia Law School podcast called ‘Inflation: Not Dead yet - Beyond Unprecedented: The Post-Pandemic Economy’ revealed some interesting choices of words.
With inflation soaring around the world, Huw Pill, chief economist and executive director for monetary analysis and research at the Bank of England discussed the factors driving high inflation and efforts to curb rising prices.
Did he mention the extraordinary amounts of money printed by the Bank of England during the pandemic? No, of course not, why would he bring up the real reason inflation is high and bite the hand that is feeding him. Instead, Pill, who earns at least £180,000 ($225,000) blamed the plebs. British households and business “need to accept” they are poorer and stop seeking pay increases and pushing prices higher, he said.
Mr. Pill called it a game of “pass the parcel” as households and companies try to pass on their higher costs. I’m sure it is a game to ex Goldman Sachs employee, Pill but it certainly isn’t for the hundreds of thousands of families living from pay cheque to pay cheque and relying on food banks to feed their families.
He blamed that game of pass the parcel on generating inflation and “that part of inflation can persist”.
So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through on to customers.
“And what we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share.
“We’re all worse off” - really Huw, do you include yourself in that? Maybe he does and can’t enjoy a fifth holiday of the year. How about the top 1% to whom all the money has been flowing? How about all the billionaires that were created during the pandemic? No, we’re not all worse off.
Inflation in the UK is currently above 10% with food inflation accelerating upwards at almost 20%. In reality we all know it’s much higher. Pill said inflation started brewing when the Covid pandemic disrupted supply in the economy but was easing until Russia turned off gas supplies to Europe.
He admitted that “inflation has been higher than we expected for longer, for an undesirably long time”. How come plenty of people who aren’t in high paying banking jobs saw inflation coming as soon as the money printers turned on and the economy shut down? At least one central banker told the truth - here is former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King explaining.
Central bankers even have a name for blaming the serfs - ‘greedflation’. Those greedy paupers trying to feed their families and so asking for a pay rise!
Fight amongst yourselves and blame each other, just don’t cotton on to the fact that our policies have massively worsened your quality of life. P.S. Please don’t look too closely at the pension bail out last year because that saved my massive Bank of England pension fund which was on the verge of going under. Yes that caused inflation to go higher too but don’t think too hard about it you silly peasants.
The covid response was the biggest robbery in the history of the world.
It used to be they were smart enough to give the populace a light little pat on the head to ease their anxieties, but now I've seen farmers treat their cattle with more respect.