I spoke in a session at the semi-annual FT Weekend Festival. The focus of the session was inflation and the implications for where you keep your money including the opportunity cost of holding cash.
As we emerge from this pandemic, inflation may be higher and more volatile than in recent years, The inflation challenge may be higher in the US than in the UK. This cyclical increase in inflation over the next eighteen months is likely to reflect a combination of a rebound in demand and supply bottlenecks as we emerge from the crisis, alongside the feed-though of significant policy easing.
Despite this, I do not think we should panic about the longer-term inflation outlook. I expect longer-term structural factors to keep inflation low beyond the next eighteen months, just as they have kept inflation low in recent decades. I will write about these in a forthcoming blog.
