Televisioni e quotidiani producono da due settimane una vera e propria montagna di “informazione”, e noi investitori tutti siamo chiamati a fare grande attenzione, a distinguere, ad analizzare, e persino a proteggerci da questa vera e propria valanga.

Quella che, a prima vista, può sembrare “informazione” spesso è invece “opinione”: allo spettatore del TG ed al lettore del quotidiano viene offerta solo una parte delle informazioni disponibili, accompagnata da ipotesi e tentativi di guadagnare interesse ed attenzione. Spesso in buona fede, e qualche volta anche in malafede.

Un esempio (in evidente buona fede) lo troviamo nel titolo che apre questo Post: il titolista del Financial Times associa in un solo titolo lo shock energetico, l’inflazione elevata e gli Anni Settanta.

In tempi non sospetti, e già a partire da due anni fa, Recce’d aveva già richiamato l’attenzione dei propri lettori sugli Anni Settanta: oggi, a distanza di molti mesi, trovate i riferimenti agli Anni Settanta su ogni quotidiano.

Il tempo che avete investito nella lettura del nostro Blog è stato, quindi, un buon investimento.

Quello che non ci convince, del titolo del Financial Times qui sopra, è l’accostamento dell’inflazione elevata allo “shock energetico”.

Perché? Perché non esiste lo shock energetico. Ma viene utilizzato, dal Financial Times e da tutta la stampa, per attribuire alla guerra in Ucraina una responsabilità che invece non è della crisi in atto.

Facciamo quindi un passo indietro, e colleghiamo all’Ucraina il tema che trovate nel titolo del nostro Post.

Abbiamo messo in evidenza per voi lettori, sette giorni fa, la profonda differenza tra la “narrativa” dominante sul tema del conflitto Ucraina - Russia e il nostro modo di vedere quella vicenda, che abbiamo ritrovato pienamente riscontrato in un articolo del sito della Rete americana di informazione NBC.

Da sempre (ed è stato ampiamente documentato) in presenza di un conflitto bellico l’utilizzo ed il controllo dei flussi di informazione è una autentica arma di guerra. Oggi, questo accade forse in una misura più ampia, rispetto al passato.

Ve lo dimostriamo in questo Post. Come sempre, Recce’d vi parla di fatti documentabili, e non di sentito dire. Vediamo insieme i dati.

Come tutti i lettori sanno, la TV italiana ha occupato decine e decine di ore, ed anche decine di diversi dibattiti, per illustrare al pubblico una crisi energetica che (nei termini utilizzati in TV) semplicemente NON ESISTE.

Potete vedere, qui sopra, che nel primo giorno del novembre 2021 il petrolio greggio WTI era trattato ad 84 dollari USA, mentre venerdì 11 marzo, dopo 16 giorni di guerra in Ucraina, era scambiato a 106 dollari USA circa.

Il rialzo? E’ del 19%.

Non esiste una crisi, almeno se guardiamo al prezzo del petrolio.

Nei dibattiti n Tv, ed anche sui quotidiani, è stata utilizzata più volte l’analogia con le conseguenze dell’embargo nei primi Anni Settanta. L’episodio era, però, totalmente diverso, e da ogni punto di vista: anche, e soprattutto nel presente contesto, con riguardo al rialzo del prezzo del petrolio, che fu del 205% come vedete sotto a sinistra nel grafico (poi, più avanti, alla fine del decennio, il rialzo toccò il 700% circa).

Ecco: quella fu una (doppia) crisi energetica. Ad oggi, 12 marzo 2022, non esiste alcuna crisi energetica, se non nei dibattiti alla TV.

Ai nostri Clienti, ed in più occasioni, abbiamo più volte chiarito il nostro pensiero, per ciò che riguarda il rialzo del prezzo del petrolio nel corso del 2021. Ciò che abbiamo visto nel 2022, a nostro giudizio, non è altro che un prolungamento di quella fase: la guerra in Ucraina è stato (almeno fino ad oggi 12 marzo 2022) soltanto un pretesto. Colto al volo, dalle TV e dalle banche di investimento internazionali, ma poi poco efficace, se guardiamo al prezzo del venerdì 11 marzo 2022.

Di ben altra importanza, a nostro giudizio, il dato che leggete qui sotto nel grafico: il rialzo del prezzo del grano.

Un dato importantissimo, e non solo per il 2022: tanto che la settimana scorsa noi ne abbiamo scritto ai Clienti in pratica ogni mattina.

Per spiegare l’impatto di questi movimenti, rispettando però la nostra esigenza di sintesi, ci affidiamo al capo del World Food Program, David Beasley, che leggete qui sotto nel tweet.

Sul loro sito, se interessati ad approfondire, trovate ulteriori informazioni: ed opinioni che vi possono essere utili. Utili proprio con riferimento alle performances 2022 e 2023 dei titoli e dei Fondi Comuni che tenete oggi in portafoglio.

Amanda Little

7 marzo 2022, 14:30 CET

While Putin’s war in Ukraine is delivering shocks to the energy market and driving up fertilizer prices, the bigger problem has become the soaring cost of wheat. Russia is steering the world toward an increasingly severe food security crisis — compounding the shortages already caused by the pandemic and climate change.

More than 70% of Ukraine is prime agricultural land that produces a major share of the world’s wheat, as well as its corn, barley, rye, sunflower oil and potatoes. Ukraine’s crop exports to the European Union, China, India and throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East are plummeting as Russian forces paralyze Ukrainian ports. They could soon cease altogether. Meanwhile, heavy Western sanctions are disrupting the flow of crop exports from Russia, the world’s top wheat producer.

Food security organizations are already hard pressed to deal with spreading hunger. Expanding shortages “will be hell on earth,” the United Nations World Food Program director David Beasley predicted last week. The threat is greatest in countries already teetering on the edge of famine, and in those that rely heavily on Ukrainian and Russian imports. Beasley said his organization will “have no choice but to take food from the hungry to feed the starving," and unless more funding pours in immediately, "we risk not even being able to feed the starving.”  

The Ukraine war is teaching international leaders a lesson they should have learned already: Long-term agricultural strategy must be built into national security plans. That means starting now to invest in more sustainable farming practices, climate-resilient crops and new growing technologies, as well as agile supply chains that can pivot around disruptions when needed. Food security must also become a central focus of international trade agreements.

Hunger fuels civil unrest and a vicious cycle of disruptions. It adds burdens, distractions and enormous costs to already strained governments as they scramble to import food at higher prices. Eventually, it can lead to mass exodus: hungry civilians fleeing their homeland in search of food.  

For millennia, robust food systems have conferred political power. Civilizations from the Mayans of Mesoamerica to the Vikings of Scandinavia rose as their food supplies flourished and fell as they declined. Even today, the nations with the least-reliable food supplies tend to have the least-diverse economies and the most conflict-prone governments.  In 2012, hunger helped foment the Arab Spring after droughts crippled wheat fields in Russia and the U.S., causing grain prices to spike worldwide. Food riots broke out in dozens of cities worldwide.

That global food crisis a decade ago forced Group of Eight nations to begin to focus on food security. They pledged significant funding for food relief. The Obama administration, for its part, set up Feed the Future, a program that deployed USAID and other agencies in targeted countries to help improve access to food. These were important efforts — but not enough.

Today, both wealthy and developing nations need to double down on this issue. Wheat prices already are at the levels they were in the 2008 food crisis — and climbing. “We can only imagine how much more devastating this is going to get,” said Catherine Bertini, a food security expert with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former director of the UN’s World Food Program. “The risk we’re facing is unprecedented.”

The Ukraine invasion has three tiers of negative influence on food security: first, on the people of Ukraine and Russia who are experiencing supply disruptions; second, on countries relying heavily on their exports; and third, on broader populations that already are feeling the shock of higher food prices. Worldwide today, 283 million people are acutely food insecure and 45 million are on the edge of famine. Famine-stricken countries such as Yemen stand to suffer most from dwindling Ukranian food exports, but also vulnerable are Egypt, Turkey and Bangladesh, which import billions of dollars of Ukrainian wheat annually.

Many other nations already struggling with food supplies depend on Ukrainian exports. Take Kenya, for instance: It derives 34% of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, and 70% of its population lacks money for food.  Or Morocco: 31% of its wheat comes from Russia and Ukraine, and 56% of its population can’t afford a stable food supply. No less than half of the wheat purchased by the United Nations for food assistance worldwide comes from Ukraine.

But no country is insulated from food disruptions going forward — including and especially the United States. With all the calls we've been hearing for greater energy independence, few have fretted over the fact that while the U.S. exports about $150 billion annually in food products, it imports nearly as much – about $145 billion. 

Why isn't food security a key topic at major global conferences? It was barely discussed last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, nor was it a priority at the COP 26 climate conference or at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The European Union, World Trade Organization and other international trade groups must prioritize stable food-trade relationships — especially for the poorest and most food-vulnerable countries.

Even if Russia’s war against Ukraine is resolved soon and their exports continue to flow, climate impacts on food production and supply chain disruptions will become increasingly severe. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released last week, hotter, dryer and more volatile growing conditions are already hobbling food systems globally, and as much as 30 percent of the world’s currently productive farm and pastureland will no longer support food production by the end of this century, if current trends continue.

Nations should steer more money to organizations like the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center  that are advancing crucial research on how to grow more resilient wheat and maize crops in regions that are becoming steadily less arable.

This isn't just a problem of the future, though — countries and communities that most urgently address their food supply challenges will be the ones best equipped to survive disruptions and thrive economically now.

Non è facile per chi, come noi, si occupa per professione di mercati finanziari e di investimenti, trattare di temi così tragici e così ampi come il conflitto in Ucraina.

Allo stesso tempo, non è possibile evitarlo.

Come tutti i lettori del Blog, anche noi abbiamo ascoltato, giorno e notte, i pareri degli esperti sui canali TV del Mondo intero. Come tutti voi lettori, anche noi abbiamo letto sui quotidiani articoli che prospettano questo o quello sbocco al conflitto in corso.

Noi, che di mestiere ci occupiamo di altre cose, non ci permettiamo di metterci alla pari con tutti questi esperti di strategie militari e politiche: rispettiamo, in ogni campo, chi ha maggiore esperienza e competenza.

Non potendo, allo stesso tempo, aggirare oppure ignorare un tema di questa ampiezza e gravità, e sempre avendo come nostro riferimento la gestione degli investimenti finanziari, con questo Post noi intendiamo offrire a chi investe il suo tempo leggendoci un angolo di visuale originale, diverso da quello che prevale sui media fino ad oggi.

Per la verità, noi nel Post lo facciamo utilizzando il lavoro proprio di un media, una canale TV di informazione basato negli Stati Uniti, uno dei più noti al Mondo. Che si chiama NBC.

Noi abbiamo trovato, sul sito di NBC, un articolo che a noi è sembrato di massimo interesse: non solo come analisi del passato, ma pure come analisi che guarda al futuro.

In questo articolo, ci si domanda se la situazione che si è creata in Ucraina nelle ultime settimane avrebbe potuto essere anticipata.

Nel team di Recce’d, tutti pensiamo che la risposta sia: sì, questa situazione avrebbe potuto essere anticipata, o quanto meno fronteggiata in modo molto diverso.

Noi pensiamo che la “narrativa” oggi dominante in merito al conflitto in Ucraina sia sbagliata.

La cosa, per noi, risulta evidente anche soltanto esaminando la carta geografica che trovate proprio qui sotto. Le nazioni con il colore azzurro sono le nazioni che oggi appartengono alla NATO. Non serve spiegare qui che cosa sia la NATO.

Sulla destra della cartina, c’è la Russia. Se la massima responsabilità politica della Russia sente dentro si sé crescere l’accerchiamento militare, voi lettori ve la sentite, di dargli torto?

Formulato in questo modo, il nostro argomento risulta decisamente grossolano, vista la complessità della situazione. Ed è proprio per questa ragione, che tra mille articoli abbiamo selezionato per voi l’articolo che trovate qui di seguito.

Articolo che afferma, e poi illustra in modo chiaro, che la “narrativa” dominante in merito al conflitto in Ucraina è sbagliata.

Perché questo argomento a voi interessa, e molto?

Perché se vi affidate alla narrativa oggi dominante, c’è il rischio di non riuscire a capire quello che succederà poi: come quelli che in televisione, una settimana fa, ripetevano “non riesco a crederci che questo sia successo, nel 2022”. Invece, è meglio se ci credi.

Prima.

March 4, 2022, 9:36 PM CET

By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory.

In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as “the steely-eyed strongman” who proved immune to “traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence” and had been “playing Biden all along.” This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russia’s horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented.

But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades — this narrative is wrong.

Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia’s willingness to go to war over Ukraine’s NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion.

Recognizing this possibility does not excuse Moscow’s actions, which are heinous. Nor does it mean Russia’s insistence on regional hegemony is fair or ethical. And ultimately, it is no guarantee that Putin would not have invaded anyway. There are other factors — including, but not limited to, Putin's general anger over Kyiv drifting away from Russian influence and domination and his isolation as a decision-maker — that may have been sufficient to drive the invasion.

But the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.

Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion — so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates — was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But what’s more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

Analysts say it’s widely known that Ukraine had no prospect of entering NATO for many years, possibly decades, because of its need for major democracy and anti-corruption reforms and because NATO has no interest in going to war with Russia over Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia has meddled and backed armed conflict for years. But by dangling the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership for years but never fulfilling it, NATO created a scenario that emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia — without any intention of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided Ukraine had gone too far.

But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraine’s future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.

“It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia,” Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,” told me. “But it was also the moral cowardice of so many Western commentators and officials and ex-officials who would not come out in public and admit that this was no longer a viable project.”

The West didn't want to set limits on NATO's enlargement and influence or lose face. So what it did was gamble.

“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”

What's happened has happened, and there’s no going back. But it still matters.

The U.S. must do everything it can do to end this war — which is already brutalizing Ukraine, rattling the global economy, and could quite easily spiral into a nuclear-armed confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, if things get out of hand — as swiftly as possible, including negotiating on Ukraine's NATO status and possible neutrality with an open mind. And over the longer term, Americans must realize that in an increasingly multipolar world, reckoning with the limits of their power is critical for achieving a more peaceful and just world.

Expanding NATO was always hugely controversial

NATO was originally formed as a military and political alliance between the U.S., Canada and several Western European nations in 1949. It was meant to serve as a collective defense organization to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and its most important provision, Article 5, held that an attack on one member of the alliance was an attack against all of them.

In 1990, the West led the Soviets to believe NATO would not expand further eastward across Europe in exchange for Germany reunification and the agreement that the new Germany would be a NATO member. Most famously, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker once assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the NATO alliance would move “not one inch eastward” in exchange for this agreement, but as the late Princeton University scholar Stephen Cohen pointed out in 2018, this pledge was in fact made multiple times by several Western countries.

These assurances were not honored, and NATO has expanded eastward over the years to include many more countries, all the way up to Russia’s borders.

“It is the broken promise to Gorbachev that lingers as America’s original sin,” Cohen said then.

NATO’s expansion was hugely controversial in policy circles in the 1990s. As foreign policy commentator Peter Beinart has noted, around the time the Clinton administration was considering NATO in the '90s to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — a debate that almost caused President Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Perry to resign — many influential voices dissented:

George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered America’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America’s Cold War historians, noted that, “historians—normally so contentious—are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”

The major concern was that expansion would backfire — that it would, as Kennan put it in 1997, “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” Indeed, Russia hated it. As Lieven previously told me, for decades the Russian political establishment and commentators have vociferously objected to NATO expansion and “warned that if this went as far as taking in Georgia and Ukraine, then there would be confrontation and strong likelihood of war.”

Russia perceives NATO as an existential threat

Russia is no longer at the helm of a global superpower, but it is still, at the very least, a regional great power, and as such it devotes considerable resources to exerting its influence beyond its borders and using the states around it as buffers. Russia views Ukraine, a large country to which it has long-running cultural and historical ties, as a particularly critical buffer state for protecting its capital.

The issue that Russia saw in NATO was not just an expanding military alliance, but one that had shifted gears to transforming and proactively intervening in global affairs. After the end of the Cold War, NATO’s raison d’être no longer existed, but instead of disbanding, its mission shifted to democracy promotion. The carrot of membership in NATO was used to encourage countries to adopt liberalization and good governance and align with U.S. political, economic and military interests.

It is imperative that America develops a clearer understanding of its adversaries and behaves more judiciously in an increasingly multipolar world.

Of particular concern to the Russians have been NATO’s operations outside of NATO countries. The Russians were shocked by NATO’s bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, where NATO not only intervened in the affairs of a non-NATO country, but took sides against the Serbs, allies of the Russians, and did so without United Nations Security Council approval. NATO has also been involved in regime change and nation-building projects in places like Libya and Afghanistan.

“NATO is a defensive organization; I don't think it had any plans on Russia,” Thomas Graham, a former special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, said regarding NATO’s expansion of territory and widening scope of operations. “All that said … if you put yourself in the position of people in the Kremlin, you can see why they came to that conclusion.”

Things turned up a notch in 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” of NATO. It did not specify a timeline, and it was assumed that it was conditional on the countries adopting political reforms, but it infuriated the Russians.

As a way to reassert its dominance in the region, Russia invaded Georgia later that year. In another sign of Russia’s intolerance of losing out to Western influence in those countries, Putin annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 in the wake of the protest-spurred ouster of Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president, which the West favored.

John Mearsheimer, an international relations scholar at the University of Chicago, argued that a number of factors, including Ukraine’s potential integration into the Western European economy, played a role in Russia’s concerns in 2014, but NATO enlargement was the “taproot” of the crisis and Russia wanted to make sure that, among other things, a NATO base couldn’t be set up in Crimea as Ukraine drifted toward the U.S.

Mearsheimer also warned that this was foreshadowing, and Ukraine’s pseudo-membership status was going to bait Moscow and result in catastrophe. “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” he said in a lecture.

Russia has grown concerned again about Ukraine for a number of reasons. Analysts like Lieven and Beebe point out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken a number of sharp measures to eradicate Russian influence in Ukraine recently by doing things like banning the use of Russian language in schools and state institutions, shutting down Kremlin-linked television stations and arresting some of the most prominent Russo-sympathetic leaders in the country — all while cooperating on the ground with NATO. Russia read this as a sign that Kyiv was throwing its lot in with the U.S. and the prospect of an agreement ensuring autonomy for the separatist-held Donbas region, crucial to Russia’s plan to thwart Ukraine’s NATO entry, might be dead.

Our current crisis

All this brings us to the crisis at hand. The takeaway of this very quick survey is not to convince you to agree with Russia’s assessment that NATO posed an existential threat to it or that it is justified in its great power politicking. As Beebe put it, whether or not Russia’s perception is accurate or justified “is immaterial to whether that perception is genuinely held and to whether they will act on that perception.” What matters is that there is clear evidence that Russia sees NATO as destabilizing, pro-democratic and anti-Russian — and clear evidence that it was willing to use force to counter NATO's enlargement.

Moreover, Putin sent clear signals that he was serious about pulling the trigger if he didn't get something. Shifting some 150,000 troops along Ukraine’s border for weeks was a real cost, and it placed pressure on him to not back down without extracting a major concession and risk losing face in front of Russia’s political elite.

“I thought, and continue to think, that we should have made a deal, that there was a deal to be had — not a deal that we liked, obviously, but a deal that the realities of the situation that we're facing required,” Beebe said.

Graham, the former NSC official, also said the U.S. made a mistake in its approach. Ukraine’s future NATO membership didn’t necessarily have to be permanently taken off the table, but the U.S. “had to be prepared to talk about it in a serious way,” he said.

Justice is circumscribed by practical matters that require us to contemplate the possibility of making things worse through imprudent action.

Emma Ashford, resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, wrote in an email that it was a “pity” that “NATO’s open-door principle was not up for debate.” Though she was skeptical about the political ability of the West to “promise to close NATO’s open door, particularly in a way that would have been credible to Moscow,” she said there were potential ways to deal with Moscow’s concerns, such as “a moratorium on NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, conventional arms control agreements limiting the scope of NATO military integration and cooperation with Ukraine, or some form of negotiated Ukrainian neutrality.”

The idea behind a moratorium — of, say, 20 years — is to provide a way for the West to propose to Russia that the issue can be taken up by a future generation of leaders, at a time when Russia's political class has changed and geopolitics may have shifted.

Whether or not opening up on the question of Ukraine’s NATO status or neutrality in some way would’ve been enough to stop Putin from pursuing war is unknowable, every expert I spoke to stressed. After all, maybe by this point changing Ukraine’s NATO status would not have allayed Putin’s concern that Ukraine was irrevocably slipping out of Russia’s sphere of influence and overcome his conception of Ukraine as Russia’s lost property. There are also always unprovable and unfalsifiable explanations for his behavior — including, but not limited to, a concern with securing his legacy, paranoia and a lack of access to accurate information due to his accumulation of power within the Kremlin.

All we do know is that the NATO element mattered a great deal to Russia’s political establishment, and there’s reason to think it could’ve changed the course of negotiations. When things looked dicey, it was worth trying.

It seems unjust that Ukraine might not be let into an alliance it wants to be part of to protect itself from a country like Russia. I would say it is. But alliances choose their own members and must weigh the geopolitical consequences of expanding them — the enhanced possibility of war chief among them. As with so many issues in politics, justice is circumscribed by practical matters that require us to contemplate the possibility of making things worse through imprudent action.

As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me, NATO’s oft-touted “open door” policy is supposed to be based on Article 10 of the treaty, but the meaning is often misunderstood.

"In recent decades, the open door has instead come to entail dangling the possibility of membership to other states, never foreclosing that possibility, and sometimes speaking as though states have a right to join NATO if they so choose (when in fact they have a right merely to ask to join)," he wrote.

That dangling is incredibly dangerous, and it's possible that it just caused Ukraine to experience the worst of all worlds: not receiving NATO protection while also enduring one of the most aggressive forms of Russian domination possible.

Many of the experts I spoke to said Ukraine's neutrality or some kind of altered NATO status should be part of the discussion in diplomatic backchannels. Critics will say this constitutes “appeasement” of Putin. But as Biden has already made clear, the U.S. is not willing to wage war with Russia, and it certainly isn't going to allow Ukraine into NATO when Russia is attacking it, since that would require all of NATO to go to war with Russia. The issue now is to think clearly about how to end a conflict that could spiral into World War III.

It is imperative that America develops a clearer understanding of its adversaries and behaves more judiciously in an increasingly multipolar world. It is not difficult to imagine the U.S. making a miscalculation over what China would be willing to do to secure its domination of the South China Sea. The U.S. may want to be the only great power in the world, free to expand its hegemony with impunity, but it is not. Refusing to see this is dangerous for us all.

In questo Post, racconteremo in modo sintetico quello che i gestori di Recce’d fanno in questi ultimi giorni, giornate di 20 ore nelle quali la volatilità dei mercati finanziari ha raggiunto livelli estremi.

Nel Post, potete leggere alcune delle cose che facciamo, quotidianamente, per garantire ai nostri Clienti di non provare la paura che proprio in questi giorni colpisce la grandissima parte degli investitori italiani, ed al tempo stesso garantire ai nostri Clienti prospettive di guadagno, per i prossimi mesi, non inferiori alle nostre performances degli ultimi anni, e probabilmente anche superiori, senza doversi assumere il rischio di “un crollo dei mercati”, a differenza di ciò che hanno fatti le Reti di vendita ed i promotori finanziari nei confronti della maggioranza degli investitori, in Italia e nel Mondo.

Il nostro lavoro quotidiano è organizzato come un processo, che qui di seguito tratteggiamo per i lettori del Blog.

La prima cosa che noi facciamo, per i nostri Clienti, è quella di selezionare le informazioni: molte delle informazioni che i media ci trasmettono sono superflue, inutili, puntano ad alimentare l’emotività dei telespettatori oppure a fare un click in più sul sito.

Una volta selezionate le informazioni, inizia il nostro quotidiano lavoro di analisi: che da un lato utilizza le informazioni di cui abbiamo appena detto (ripulite, selezionate e prioritizzate) e dall’altro utilizza le reazioni immediate dei mercati. Reazioni che, nella loro gran parte in periodi come questo, non significano assolutamente nulla, se prese a sé stante.

Proprio per questo, per la estrema volatilità legata alla emotività, per noi è importante fare riferimento, giorno dopo giorno dopo giorno, alla nostra strategia di investimento, che in una piccola parte abbiamo illustrato anche ai lettori del nostro Blog.

La nostra strategia era stata definita ed elaborata mesi e mesi fa: quando ancora in Ucraina non era scoppiata la guerra, ma quando ancora poteva essere utile tenere conto di fattori di rischio (prevedibili, ed anche del tutto imprevedibili).

Per questo, oggi, la nostra strategia di investimento funziona, e moltissime altre falliscono: falliscono tutte le strategie di investimento basate sul “tutto andrà sempre bene in futuro, perché le Banche Centrali ci copriranno sempre le spalle”. Le cose non funzionano in quel modo, e mai funzioneranno in quel modo in futuro.

Detto della strategia, c’è poi anche la tattica: i temi di mercato di più breve termine. Quelli che tutti vedono, e quelli che invece pochissimi mettono in evidenza. Che sono invece, sempre, quelli che avranno una maggiore influenza sul futuro di rendimenti e rischi.

In questo preciso momento, in modo particolare, la nostra attenzione è rivolta alle MODALITA’ di funzionamento dei mercati finanziari in Occidente.

Tutti voi, amici lettori, siete distratti dalle oscillazioni dei maggiori indici di borsa, sui quali si dilungano i TG ed i quotidiani. Tutti voi siete, ormai, abituati a leggere titoli del tipo “Le Borse recuperano perché è in vista una tregua” oppure “Le Borse crollano perché aumentano i bombardamenti”.

Non fatevi distrarre. Non sprecate il vostro tempo. Le oscillazioni degli indici di Borsa, in settimane come queste significano NULLA se prese di per sé, alla lettera.

Per essere più chiari: non è vero (per nulla) che gli indici rimbalzano “perché c’è ottimismo sulla guerra” e viceversa.

In un mercato come quello di queste settimane, la guerra fa soltanto da sfondo. Non dovete immaginarvi grandi (solo per dimensioni) investitori, come i Fondi Comuni, che il martedì vendono tutto e poi il giovedì ricomprano tutto.

Questi grandi Fondi, in realtà, stanno fermi: imbambolati ed impotenti di fronte al Mondo che cambia.

Ciò che davvero conta, in mercati come questi, è solo la sistemazione delle singole individuali vicende.

Soltanto chi è poco attento, poco informato, oppure molto ingenuo, può immaginare che le sanzioni introdotte per colpire l’economia della Russia colpiscano soltanto Aziende ed individui russi.

Le conseguenze, le ricadute, saranno pesanti anche per molte Aziende, e molti individui, in Occidente.

La Russia, tutti lo sanno, è stato un partner privilegiato per molte Aziende dell’Occidente, negli ultimi 20 anni. I cosiddetti oligarchi, oggi famigerati, hanno accumulato le loro favolose fortune grazie alle Aziende occidentali.

Ed in modo particolare, sfruttando la frenetica opera di intermediazione svolta, a loro favore dalle banche dell’Occidente.

Quello di cui stiamo parlando qui non è il generico problema che trovate sui quotidiani: “quali sono le banche più esposte verso la Russia?”.

Il problema è molto più specifico: ci sono Istituzioni (banche o altro) per le quali l’effetto delle sanzioni contro la Russia mette in discussione la stabilità? A causa di operazioni, e legami, che sono sconosciuti a tutti, e forse persino alle Banche Centrali?

Come tutte le persone che operano sui mercati finanziari da qualche decennio, anche in Recce’d i seniors hanno qualche idea a questo proposito: viene automatico fare alcuni nomi, per chi ha seguito con quotidiana attenzione le vicende dell’economia e della finanza Occidentale negli ultimi decenni, ed in particolare i complessi e ramificati rapporti con la Russia.

Ma noi, in questo Blog, evitiamo sempre ed in modo accurato ogni speculazione, ogni frase che non sia informazione per il lettore bensì un pettegolezzo raccolto in un colloquio, magari alla fine di una riunione.

Immagini e grafici di questo Post servono quindi per riferire al lettore alcuni dati di fatto, e non cercano di indurre il lettore a ricavare conclusioni che, ad oggi, non sarebbero fondate sui fatti.

Allo stesso tempo, non possiamo permetterci di ignorare segnali come questi, comparsi negli ultimi giorni. Il nostro monitoraggio è ovviamente quotidiano, e quotidianamente ne riferiamo ai nostri Clienti, con eventuali implicazioni operative.

Chiudiamo questo Post mettendo in evidenza altri segnali, comparsi nel corso dell’ultima settimana, che Recce’d giudica di gran lunga più importanti, rispetto alle oscillazioni delle Borse delle quali vi parlano i TG.

A prima vista, il tema dello “spread FRA/OIS” potrebbe apparire un tecnicismo superfluo in momenti di massima tensione emotiva sui mercati.

Al contrario, questo indicatore ci racconta che cosa sta cambiando nel sottosuolo dei mercati finanziari: ovvero, nei rapporti tra le istituzioni finanziarie.

Per semplificare, potremmo di dire che quello che vedete qui sotto, nel grafico, è il prezzo che viene pagato da una Istituzione finanziaria ad una altra Istituzione finanziaria, quando la seconda chiede denaro in prestito alla prima. Un indicatore, cruciale, di fiducia.

L’allargamento di questo spread quindi ci racconta che la fiducia tra banca e banca sta rapidamente diminuendo: ed è nostro compito chiederci se ci sono informazioni, tra gli operatori, che il pubblico ancora non conosce.

Il tema richiede spazio e dettaglio e tempo: che per questo Post purtroppo non abbiamo.

Riprenderemo questo specifico argomento, durante la prossima settimana, nella Sezione Operatività del nostro The Morning Brief.

Tutta la simpatia di noi di Recce’d va alle vittime del conflitto che si è scatenato in Ucraina, e da sempre pensiamo che la guerra è una tragedia da evitare ad ogni costo.

Non sempre è evitabile, questo lo sappiamo: ed è per questa semplice ragione, che ci leggete qui intenti a fare il nostro lavoro, anche quando la nostra emotività ci porterebbe a impegnarci a favore delle vittime di questa tragedia.

Il nostro lavoro ci impone, in momenti come questi, di mantenere al massimo la lucidità, la concentrazione sui temi sui quali dobbiamo risposte ai nostri Clienti, ed una visuale il più ampia possibile, anche al di là del conflitto bellico.

Il nostro lavoro ci impone di ricordare, ai Clienti ed in questo Post anche ai lettori, che la guerra NON costituisce, oggi nel marzo 2022, il principale problema che i mercati finanziari si trovano di fronte. Non è quello dell’Ucraina, e lo vedrete, il tema centrale di questo 2022: non dipenderanno da questo (e lo scrivevamo proprio qui nel Blog già alcune settimane fa) i rendimenti ed i rischi delle diverse classi di attività finanziarie nel 2022.

O meglio, non dipenderanno PRINCIPALMENTE da questa vicenda, bensì soprattutto da altre vicende.

Non ci dilunghiamo: l’incalzare dell’attualità ci costringe questa settimana ad un utilizzo molto attento dei tempi, che per noi sono strettissimi data la grande mole di lavoro che dobbiamo fare per i Clienti.

Ci faremo quindi aiutare: il nostro lavoro di raccolta e selezione delle informazioni per il Cliente ci consente di individuare i commenti più utili ad anticipare gli sviluppi dei mercati finanziari, ed alcuni di questi (una piccola parte) li pubblichiamo poi nel nostro Blog.

L’articolo che segue vi può essere utile per una serie di ragioni: tra le tante, noi vi segnaliamo con questo articolo che il conflitto in Ucraina non è il solo evento storico a cui state assistendo.

Ha ragione chi dice, alla Tv, che il conflitto in Ucraina è storico perché è il primo conflitto di questo tipo in Europa dalla Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Ma, pensando al nostro portafoglio in titoli, ed ai nostri investimenti sui mercati finanziari, a nostro giudizio risulta ancora più “storico” l’errore fatto dalle Banche Centrali sull’inflazione.

Che cosa lo dimostra? Il fatto che, per ritrovare un episodio della medesima gravità, è necessario ritornare a prima, della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Al periodo tra le due Guerre Mondiali.

Il titolo dell’articolo, giustamente, è il seguente: “L’errore storico della Federal Reserve”.

CAMBRIDGE, England (Project Syndicate)—A close friend who has been incredibly successful in his tech career once observed that an initial suboptimal decision is likely to lead to a series of subsequent bad decisions. Economists call this “multiple equilibria.” And the Federal Reserve, the world’s most influential monetary institution, finds itself in the midst of such a situation regarding inflation—with implications that extend well beyond U.S. economics and finance.

The initial phase of the Fed’s ongoing inflation mistake—an error that will likely be remembered as one of its biggest ever—started with last year’s protracted mischaracterization and dismissal of price increases as “transitory.” Although evidence of persistently high inflation dynamics was increasingly visible, the Fed repeatedly dismissed these signs, failing, most notably, to heed the warnings expressed by firms on one earnings call after another.

Double down on the wrong policy

It is not entirely clear what was behind the Fed’s initial misstep on inflation. What remains baffling is that, for most of 2021, policy makers seemed eager to double down on their “transitory” claim, rather than show humility as their inflation forecasts were revealed to be repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.

Even today, officials are hindering the restoration of the Fed’s badly damaged credibility by not explaining why they made this protracted mistake. I suspect the reason involves some combination of cognitive capture, loss of focus, unwillingness to admit error, and reluctance to abandon a “new monetary framework” that quickly became outdated and counterproductive.

It was not until the end of November 2021 that Fed Chair Jerome Powell—finally and belatedly—declared it was time to “retire” the word “transitory.” But then came the second stage of the Fed’s multifaceted blunder. The policy adjustments that followed Powell’s statement were extremely modest, with the Fed announcing only that its large-scale asset-purchase program, known as quantitative easing (QE), would be wound down entirely by March 2022.

Losing control of narrative

That was the time for the Fed to do two things to restore its inflation credentials and retain adequate control of its policy narrative. First, it should have explained why it messed up its inflation call so badly and how it had adjusted its forecasting models to be less wrong in future. Second, the Fed should have taken significant initial policy steps and provided guidance about what would follow.

Having failed to do either, the Fed then entered the third stage of its historic mistake by losing control of the policy narrative just as inflation readings were getting worse.

Nothing highlighted better the big hole that the Fed had dug itself than the fact that, as late as February 2022, it was continuing its QE liquidity injections, even though inflation was running at 7.5%, a 40-year high. Astoundingly, and despite calls to act, the Fed had rejected an immediate halt to QE at both its December and January policy meetings.

All of which brings us to today. Inflation readings continue to surprise on the upside, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will increase the risk of a stagflationary shock. Meanwhile, Fed officials have offered different views publicly regarding how the central bank should approach both interest-rate hikes and reducing its bloated $9 trillion balance sheet.

Lacking any proper guidance from the Fed, the market rushed to price 7 to 8 rate hikes in 2022 alone. Some Wall Street analysts went as far as 10, including a 50-basis-point hike as soon as the Fed’s mid-March meeting. Others urged the Fed to implement an emergency intra-meeting rate increase.

You can’t get there from here

The Fed’s suboptimal decisions over the past 12 months mean that its next policy decision also is likely to be suboptimal. Even if it had a good feel for the current “first best” policy response, the Fed is unlikely to be able to implement it, given how far policy makers have fallen behind economic realities. To paraphrase the old Irish joke, you can’t get to a first-best policy starting from here.

Rather than being able to deliver a smooth landing for the U.S. economy, the Fed must now judge what constitutes the least harmful alternative. Such a choice is like being forced to select an already dirty shirt because no clean ones are available anymore. And that is not a good look.

Mohamed A. El-Erian, president of Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse” (Random House, 2016).

This commentary was published with permission of Project Syndicate — The Fed’s Historic Error

La nostra intenzione, con questo Post ed attraverso la lettura dell’articolo precedente, è precisa: vogliamo ricordare ai nostri lettori che NON è dai titoli dei TG che potete ricavare le informazioni che sono le più importanti per le vostre scelte di investimento.

Oggi, tutta l’attenzione si concentra, comprensibilmente, sull’Ucraina. Ma voi, in quanto investitori, non potete permettervi di andare in confusione.

Oggi, per noi e voi e per tutti gli investitori, ci sono altri temi, che avranno in prospettiva un impatto ancora maggiore sui vostri investimenti e quindi sui vostri guadagni o perdite.

La nostra intenzione, quindi, è quella di esservi utili, nello stabilire un giusto ordine di importanza e di priorità.

Tra i lettori del nostro Blog, non sono molti quelli che hanno vissuto le precedenti esperienze delle economie occidentali con l’inflazione, ed in particolare l’esperienza dell’iperinflazione tra le due Guerre Mondiali. Proprio per questa ragione, noi offriamo in lettura qui sotto un’utile articolo di Martin Wolf, che aiuterà il nostro lettore a collocare il problema di cui ha letto nell’articolo precedente nella giusta prospettiva storica.

E’ appropriato definire storico l’errore commesso dalle Banche Centrali, come si faceva nell’articolo qui sopra. Per noi investitori adesso si tratta di capire se risulteranno storiche anche le conseguenze di questo errore, ed in quale ambito.

Perché Recce’d insiste proprio su questo punto? Per una ragione pratica: l’investitore che oggi non è consapevole di essere di fronte ad un evento storico, cade nella trappola di quelli che dicono che “tutto va avanti come sempre”, ed opera sul proprio portafoglio titoli come se tutto dovesse andare avanti “come sempre”. E’ un grave errore.: stiamo affrontando una fase di cambiamento radicale, una fase storica, e lo capirete bene leggendo l’articolo che segue. E, nel caso eventuale in cui questo secondo articolo non sia sufficiente, allora dopo l’articolo abbiamo pubblicato, in una immagine, una parte dell’Audizione di Jerome Powell della settimana scorsa al Congresso. Che elimina, in modo definitivo, ogni dubbio.

Una fase di profondo cambiamento richiede un cambiamento altrettanto profondo nei modi e nei tempi della gestione dei propri investimenti. Troverete noi di Recce’d pronti e disponibili ad accompagnarvi lungo questo percorso di cambiamento.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Milton Friedman made this remark in 1963. At that time, few macroeconomists agreed with him. Twenty years later a high proportion did. Twenty years after that, again most did not. Today, almost another two decades later, economists have to take money seriously again. If money is ignored, it will take revenge.

As Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio recently asked: “Where is the understanding of history and the common sense about the quantity of money and credit and the amount of inflation?”

The idea that there is a link between the money supply and inflation is very old. When people are holding more money than they desire, they will want to get rid of it. With any other asset, this would lower its price. But the nominal price of money is fixed: a dollar is a dollar. The adjustment comes via higher prices for everything else — or inflation. After an exceptional monetary expansion in 2020, we are surely seeing this. I noted the possibility in May that year.

Tim Congdon, a well-known monetarist, had argued this before me. According to the Center for Financial Stability, “Divisia M4” (an index that weights the components by their role in transactions) grew by 30 per cent in the year to July 2020, almost three times as fast as in any similar period since 1967. No such thing happened after the 2008 financial crisis. Many then worried over the expansion of the monetary base. But that did not matter because it did not affect broader aggregates.

A big lesson of history is that if economists think they understand how the macroeconomy works, they will be wrong.

1. In the 1930s, the conventional wisdom was that the economy was self-stabilising.

2. In the 1960s, it was that inflation expectations and money did not matter.

3. In the 1980s, it was that only money mattered. In the 2000s, it was that credit expansion would not destabilise the financial system.

4. In 2020, it was that money was irrelevant.

Again and again, we fall in love with naive stories. We want to believe the economy is a simple mechanism, but it is not. In 1975, the British economist Charles Goodhart argued that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes”. His insight was applied to the failure of monetarism to steer the economy.

But Friedman would not have been surprised. He had argued that money affected the economy with “a lag that is both long and variable”. But he did not believe in steering the economy. Those who did moved on to inflation targeting instead. Yet “Goodhart’s law” has a plausible corollary: once a measure ceases to be a target, it will again become meaningful.

As Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, noted in an outstanding recent lecture: “Money has disappeared from modern models of inflation.” That is ridiculous. So, why has this happened? It is because technocrats have a foolish tendency to prefer being precisely wrong to being roughly right. So, where are we today? Optimists argue that the inflation we are seeing is just the result of temporary shortages caused by the pandemic. That is indeed part of the story, as a recent paper from the IMF explains. Yet the requirement, it asserts, is “to sustain a still-incomplete recovery and ensure that output catches up with its pre-pandemic trend — without allowing wages and prices to spiral upwards”. Indeed.

The difficulty is that, as Robin Brooks of the Institute of International Finance has shown, inflation has become general: in the US, the weight in the index of items with price rises of over 2 per cent in the year to January 2022 was just under 90 per cent.

To make things worse, Alex Domash and Lawrence Summers argue that measures showing a very tight US labour market, such as the vacancy and quit rates, are better indicators of inflationary pressures than non-employment. Worse, today’s labour market tightness would previously have been associated with sub-2 per cent unemployment. In sum, the inflationary genie is out of the bottle, especially in the US.

The danger is that this ignites a spiral, in which inflation expectations shift upwards, causing a flight from money and so further destabilising expectations. There is no point in insisting this will not happen, because it clearly might do so when inflation is so far above the target and previous forecasts. Credibility will have to be preserved, whatever it takes. Line chart of Inflation generalisation: weight (%) of items in basket with year-on-year inflation above 2% showing Year-on-year inflation is far from restricted to just a few items

What this means in policy now is difficult enough. But as King powerfully argues, central bankers also have to reconsider some of their recent doctrines. Just as the financial crisis showed that banking matters, so this inflationary upsurge shows that money matters. It also indicates that forward guidance assumes more knowledge than anybody possesses. Central banks may explain their reaction function, but cannot say what they are going to do, because they do not know what the economy will do.

Last but not least, average inflation targeting is surely stillborn. It never made sense to target future inflation in the light of past mistakes. Is the US Federal Reserve really going to lower inflation below 2 per cent in order to make up for a prolonged overshoot? What does make sense is to reassert its determination to hit its forward-looking target. But it is also possible we are going to see a degree of financial instability that will force deeper thinking on this, too.

We should always remember how little we know about the economy. Central banks must be humble and prudent. They cannot ignore valuable information just because they do not like what it shows. Yes, we cannot steer the economy via the money supply. But we cannot ignore it either. It carries warnings.

martin.wolf@ft.com

Come scritto oggi in un altro Post, anche i poveri si sentivano ricchi nel 2021: per merito della Borsa, del Bitcoin, o di una truffa sui ristori, noi non lo possiamo sapere.

Come tutti avete visto, anche da questo punto di vista il 2022 ha poco o nulla in comune con il 2021..

Nei primi mesi del 2022, non avete più sentito parlare di auto nuova, barca nuova, casa nuova: è cambiata la psicologia della massa.

Da un clima di “festa per la quale nessuno pagherà il conto”, si è passati al classico clima da “la festa è finita”.

Ma la cosa peggiore non è questa: la cosa peggiore è rendersi conto che una festa, una vera festa, non è mai esistita: mentre purtroppo ci resta, a tutti quanti da pagare un conto molto salato. Da pagare soltanto per avere avuto il gusto di raccontare in giro di “avere fatto dei gran bei soldi”, che poi nessuno ha fatto veramente.

Non si tratta di una previsione: le cose stanno già così oggi. Nel Regno Unito, si stima che sia in arrivo già nei prossimi mesi, tra tasse e bollette, un calo del potere di acquisto di dimensioni eccezionali (lo documenta qui sotto l’articolo).

E se pensate che soffriranno “soltanto i poveri”, beh … siete degli ingenui. Soffriranno tutti, poveri e meno poveri o futuri poveri, perché quel calo del potere di acquisto, ovviamente, colpirà tutti i generi di beni di prima necessità, dal pane al latte al gasolio all’immobile … fino al Bitcoin e alle azioni Tesla.

Ve lo documentiamo con l’articolo che segue.

Quanto alle implicazioni per le scelte di investimento, come sempre trovate Recce’d disponibile a confrontarsi ed a mettere a vostra disposizione le nostre competenze e la nostra esperienza. Contattateci, quanto prima, attraverso il nostro sito, se non volete perdere altro tempo a correre dietro al miraggio.

Millions of Britons who previously found themselves financially 'comfortable' are feeling the heat over accelerating inflation, record energy bills, and tax increases which kick in this year.

According to the Bank of England, scorching inflation will result in the largest drop in disposable income in 30 years when adjusted for inflation.

In April, UK energy bills are due to jump 54% to around 2,000 pounds ($2,723) a year per household. While some of it will be offset by emergency government support - and social security will also increase, it will be against the backdrop of rising interest rates according to Reuters.

"There's just too much going up at once," said 38-yaer-old care worker Nicola Frape, who huddles under blankets with her 14-year-old daughter to conserve heat, and have limited roadtrips due to the price of gas. "The pressure is just going to be even worse in April," she added.

With economies around the world rebounding from coronavirus lockdowns, prices for everything from food and clothes to haircuts and rent, as well as energy are going up, fuelled by resurgent demand and shortages due to supply chain disruptions.

Accurate national comparisons of changes in living standards are hard to make but concerns about inflation are emerging as a big factor in elections including France's presidential race in April and U.S. midterm elections in November. -Reuters

A February survey found that the number of people experiencing food insecurity was 20% higher in January than the previous six months, according to FT.

The decline in living standards for much of the UK population prompted chancellor Rishi Sunak last week to announce a £9bn package to help struggling households.

On the same day energy regulator Ofgem announced a 54 per cent rise in energy bills and the Bank of England increased interest rates from 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent. It warned inflation could hit 7.25 per cent by April, threatening to limit people’s spending power as a planned increase in National Insurance contributions reduces their take-home pay.

In January, Britain's consumer price inflation hit 5.5% y/y, the highest since 1992. It's set to top 7% in April, at which point the BoE thinks they may begin to slow. That said, they also expect it will be above 5% in a year's time. 

In the US, 'official' inflation is north of 7% - the highest since the early 1980s.

According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research think tank, the combination of April's payroll tax increase plus inflation could result in a 30% rise in destitution across the UK.

The rampant inflation in the UK has sent government interest rates soaring - hitting £6.1bn last month, the highest amount for a January since records began in April 1997 and up from £4.5bn last year, the BBC reports.

The payments are pegged to the Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation - which reached 7.8% in January.

January's interest payments were, however, below the all-time high of £9bn in June last year.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the BBC it was worth noting that "overall interest payments by the government are still at remarkably low levels" despite UK debt levels at the highest for 60 years. -BBC

Meanwhile between April and September of 2021, food bank deliveries rose 11% vs. the same period in 2019, hitting one of its highest levels ever in December. At one West London food bank, Dad's House, some of the former donors to the charity are now recipients of support.

"I have to pay my bills," said Jackie Gordon, 52. "I'm behind with my rent and I don't want to get evicted."

Rebecca McDonald, a senior economist at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said this year will likely leave a lasting mark on poorer households regardless of whatever inflation does.

"It's going to feel like a much more longer-term issue because this year is going to be incredibly difficult," she said, adding that many formerly financially sound families will likely go into debt this year.