Summary
THE upshot of the increase in prices announced by British Gas, Britain's biggest energy provider, is that many families will soon be spending more than ?100 a month on their fuel bills. The knock- on effect of this is that inf lation will certainly exceed four per cent; the Government's target is two. In fact it is worse than that.
Last month, before the big energy companies announced their eye- watering increases, factory gate prices- as charged by manufacturers for their goods -rose by 10 per cent. By one estimate, the price of basic foodstuffs has already risen this year over last year by nearly a fifth. No one quite likes to talk about recession - that, technically, refers to two successive quarters of negative growth in the economy -but if growth last month was 0.2 per cent, the trend suggests that we are not far off stagnant or negative growth now. In other words, we are not talking ourselves into a recession: we are facing the real thing.See the full content of this document
Extract
Energy Bills Add to the Pain
Inflation is not in the mind. People know where the pri...
See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
