As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, announces £54 billion in increased taxes and cuts to public services in order to reduce a fiscal deficit being blamed on everything from the Pandemic to Putin and Brexit, this is a look at the actual causes of our spiralling inflation, not just in the UK but across the globe.
In June 2019, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the world’s central bank, published its Annual Economic Report. This began with the statement: ‘It was perhaps too good to be true’ — the ‘it’ being the recovery from the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis. Describing financial markets as ‘jittery’, the report warned investors about the social and political backlash against what it called the ‘open international economic order’, which the BIS predicted would continue to cast a ‘long if unpredictable shadow’ over the global economy:
From a historical perspective, it is not unusual to see such surges of sentiment in the wake of major economic shockwaves: the Great Depression marked the end of the previous globalisation era. It is too early to tell how this surge will evolve; but it will clearly be a force to contend with in the years to come.
What the BIS was describing here are not only the classic symptoms of a financial crisis produced by the internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation — according to which, as the wages of workers are deflated so too is the purchasing power of consumers, threatening the profits of capitalists and resulting in an inflated credit bubble — but also the threat of the social unrest they cause in the body politic. As the bank of highest appeal on monetary policy, the BIS is more than aware of the threat this presents to the global financial system. The following month, accordingly, in July 2019, the BIS called for ‘unconventional policy’ in order to ‘insulate the real economy’ from further deterioration in conditions, specifically advocating that, by offering direct credit to the economy, central banks could ‘replace commercial banks in providing loans’.
