The major costs of large bouts of inflation are not that they make us worse off, though for many people they undoubtedly do. No, the three biggest costs of high inflation are: The longer this volatility continues, the more we look to mitigate – with our commercial broadcast partners but also by testing access to audiences elsewhere. Clients that are econometrically modelled to a required level of TVRs have never been so willing to try something different. A FINANCIAL TIMES "BOOK TO READ IN 2023" "Everything you wanted to know about inflation but were afraid to ask."-Mervyn King "King's lessons command our attention."-Lawrence H. A myth-busting explanation of inflation, the desperate gullibility of central bankers and finance ministers—and our abject failure to learn from history

Boeing and McDonnell Douglas have merged, leaving the US with just one large producer of civilian aircraft: Boeing. Everything you wanted to know about inflation but were afraid to ask. This book is timely, well-researched and very well-written.”—Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England From investors and monetary authorities to governments and policy makers, almost everyone had assumed inflation was dead and buried. But now people the world over are confronting a poisonous new economic reality and, with it, the prospect of vast and increasing wealth inequality. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. In April, Procter & Gamble announced it would start charging more for consumer staples ranging from diapers to toilet paper, citing “rising costs for raw materials, such as resin and pulp, and higher expenses to transport goods”.

14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years

Third, are inflationary risks trivialised or excused? It took 2.5 years for the annual rate of UK inflation to rise from 0.3 per cent to 10 per cent: yet, throughout that period, the Bank of England persistently forecast that inflation would return to the 2 per cent target within two years. How will the consumer react as the cost of living ratchets up? Right now, we don't know. It's been a very long time since there has been a comparable situation. We need our collective ears to the ground on this matter more than any other. The book is genuinely interesting throughout, yet also wide‐​ranging, so choosing sections to review is difficult. But three areas where King has alot of particularly interesting things to say are on how policymakers might think about inflation’s persistence, why inflation matters, and the difficulties of alleviating modest inflation. Normally I would enjoy any book on monetary policy, but I found this book to be very poorly structured, jumping around in time, pushing an Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton analogy too far (when it would have been far simpler to just talk directly about the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy - the points would have been more easily grasped). Institutional reforms in a world of deflationary risk can lead to an inadvertent bias in favour of inflation

A ‘rules-based’ policy framework is important: the public need to know how policymakers are likely to respond It could raise prices and rake in more money because P&G faces almost no competition. The lion’s share of the market for diapers, to take one example, is controlled by just two companies – P&G and Kimberly-Clark – which roughly coordinate their prices and production. It was hardly a coincidence that Kimberly-Clark announced price increases similar to P&Gs at the same time P&G announced its own price increases. A book cannot do everything, though, and this one was written as the inflationary picture was continually evolving. Overall, it is the best book on the market for using this moment to deliver lessons in history and advice to policymakers. It somehow remains both broad and deep, explaining the perils of ever thinking that inflation is whipped right through to analyzing what went wrong with former UK prime minister Liz Truss’s infamous mini‐​budget. But there’s a deeper structural reason for inflation, one that appears to be growing worse: the economic concentration of the American economy in the hands of a relative few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.Are there signs of monetary excess that indicate heightened inflationary risk? Here, King points to the rate of US monetary expansion during the pandemic. Distributional costs of inflation / Why is inflation such abad thing? Many people conflate inflation with the cost of living and are hostile to it because of the effect arising price level has on the real value of some fixed forms of income and wealth. But King uses aremarkable statistic to show that this shouldn’t be our main inflationary fear. And this is what the real income per capita numbers hide: large bouts of inflation create extreme winners and losers in quite undemocratic ways. Asudden bout of inflation obviously makes those on fixed incomes or stable government benefits alot worse off, while those for whom wage increases occur only infrequently see their purchasing power collapse. On the other hand, those who can borrow heavily and invest the funds in physical assets and real estate, or who have alot of pricing power over their labor, can often come out of inflationary periods sitting (relatively) pretty. These effects are often arbitrary and politically explosive. Policymakers are not easily able to distinguish inflationary squalls from periods of inflationary persistence

A damning critique. . . . King writes lucidly, avoiding the jargon that makes economics impenetrable to the lay reader.”—Edward Chancellor, Times Literary Supplementii. have there been signs of monetary excess sufficient to indicate a heightened inflationary risk? Not just a useful and well-written account of inflation for the layman, but a contribution to a debate that is still very much live. A brilliantly clear and concise new history.”—Juliet Samuel, Times (UK) A shame, because nothing is more topical than inflation at this point in time. But this book was poorly served by its structure. Airlines have merged from 12 in 1980 to four today, which now control 80% of domestic seating capacity. Germany famously suffered aterrible hyperinflation in 1922–1923, with a monthly inflation rate of 322 percent. Yet, remarkably, German real incomes per capita fell only 7.8 percent between 1918 and 1923, considerably less of adecline than seen in the United Kingdom over the same period. In other words, even though prices were shooting up, so were nominal incomes—at least across the economy in aggregate.

If PepsiCo faced tough competition, it could never have gotten away with this. But it doesn’t. To the contrary, it appears to have colluded with Coca-Cola – which, oddly, announced price increases at about the same time as PepsiCo, and has increased its profit margins to 28.9%.As with all the best economists, King’s views are grounded in an understanding of our historical experience.”—Roger Bootle, Daily Telegraph How might monetary policymakers better assess whether inflationary pressures are likely to be more persistent in the future? King posits four “tests” that they should consider. If the answers to the questions are “yes,” then our monetary overlords should be alive to the threat of ongoing elevated inflation. The implicit critique is that, by failing to consider these questions this time, central bankers were asleep at the wheel, allowing aggregate demand to outstrip supply.