Inflation is impossible to predict and makes business planning impossible
From a business point of view the main problem with inflation is that it is presently unknowable and therefore unmanageable.
If it were possible to plan on the basis that inflation would, let’s say, go to 10% by July but drift down after that, that’s workable.
It presently isn’t possible to do that and it is hard to find a business that has immunity to the problem.
Greggs the bakers, for example, is not a business of serious social consequence (fans of its fare might disagree).
But it does employ lots of people and form a significant part of many people’s day.
What is going to happen to the cost of its sausage rolls? CEO Roger Whiteside admits he has no idea.
“We put prices up at the beginning of the year. What we do next, I can’t tell you,” he says.
So even a business as on the face of it as simple as Greggs is watching commodity markets like any City trader and feeling nervous.
The cost of fuel and ingredients and staff and everything else is on the up, which means so are sausage rolls.
In less difficult circumstances you might look to the Bank of England to Do Something.
But the Bank has rather painted itself into a corner. First by insisting inflation was a passing problem, then flip flopping in December to raise rates plainly too late.
What will it do now, stick or twist? Probably it and other central banks will keep raising borrowing costs, but the war must at least have rather clouded their thinking.
On Thursday we will get for the first time European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde’s take on Ukraine and inflation. It would be good if she had a plan.
