Commentary
For much of the decade before the COVID pandemic, Britain’s inflation problem was its absence. Prices rose too slowly. Policymakers fretted about deflation, secular stagnation and the limits of monetary policy. Interest rates hovered near zero. Quantitative easing was deployed not to restrain demand, but to stimulate it—often with disappointing results, unless you happened to own property or financial assets. Hitting the Bank of England’s 2 percent inflation target looked less like a ceiling than a distant aspiration.