174. What Is Really Going On With Inflation

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1:29where the company is stable or is regulated. In the podcast channel, good news for credit reform. Everywhere, where there are podcasts.

1:59us and one in particular I'd love to tell you about is a lad called Joe. He's 18. He's been listening to us right from the start. In fact, he showed me a picture of him with me from when he was like 11 or something like that. So he's like one of our, you know, hardcore loyal supporters in life. But what's interesting about him is he's kind of deciding what to do with his life now. And he is going to do computer science off the back of us talking about AI so much and all the jobs being there. That's heartwarming, as you say. And actually, weirdly, it brings to mind one of the striking things that happened to me in the many years after the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, because it's sort of amazing how many young economics graduates made their way to me subsequently and said, I studied economics because of the way you were telling us the global economy See, we're doing our bit.

2:57During 2007-8. So, I mean, whether the world has too many or too few economists, let's debate that at some point. But it appears that both of us are adding to the world of growth. Yeah, yeah. Shall we talk inflation now? Because the figures are out, aren't they? So there's been quite a jump in inflation. It's 3.5%, highest level since February last year. You remember we were talking about them in March. March, it was 2.6 % in March. So it's gone up quite a lot, a lot to do with energy bills, food, transport costs, which all seem to be heading upwards. I know I was talking to my business partner last night about what's happening with our retail business and energy bills are the things that he said are really, really hitting them now.

3:45And also the impact now of all the changes in taxes with wages and stuff inevitably means, you're going to start to see business putting up prices because of it too. So it feels like that's all feeding into the figures now, doesn't it? Yes, that's right. As listeners will know, it's not just the headline rate that matters to the economic impact of this. It's how it compares with the Bank of England's expectations and indeed the market expectations. And the reason this was a bit worrying was that this 3.5 is higher than what the Bank of England was forecasting, which was 3.4. And the sort of average of sort of market forecasters was 3.3.

4:29So it is a bit worse. And it's one of the reasons why markets, as we speak, are discounting something which will worry anybody who has debt and in particular those who have yet to refinance their mortgages at the new interest rates because markets are saying interest rates will come down slower than people were expecting yesterday. And I just think a couple of other sort of important elements of this that we should mention. The sort of eye-watering one, I don't know if you saw this, was that inflation in our water bills, 26.1%. I mean, those blooming water companies. I know, they have the monopoly on those as well.

5:14You know, sewage everywhere. Obviously, they've got to pay to basically fix their own mistakes. But I mean, I think many people would just say it's outrageous the way that they are putting up their bills, which we have to pay to fix their mistakes. Anyway, so that's one big thing. But the other aspect of all of this that is obviously disturbing, we've talked about this before, is that both core inflation is rising again, And that's inflation stripping out, you know, the energy price hikes, for example, and food hikes. And then service inflation, which is a measure that the Bank of England takes very seriously, also rising again.

6:00and both up to levels I think we haven't seen for about a year, which, as I say, these are the factors that the Bank of England will take into account when deciding the pace of interest rate cuts. So not great. The final thing, just to sort of pick up on something that you said, there is evidence here that the increase in employers' national insurance and indeed the increase in the minimum wage, all of which have just come in, though announced by the government in the autumn, they have been passed on by employers in the form of higher prices. So food prices, for example, are thought, one of the reasons food prices are rising at the moment is that supermarkets have put up their prices in order to make the pay rises for their staff more affordable and in order to pay the very significant increase in employers' national insurance.

6:59So Rachel Reeve's budget of last autumn has had an impact, a negative impact on people's living standards, as we feared it would. Which is interesting because obviously their whole mantra was to not tax working people. But actually, you end up doing that indirectly. If you're making it more expensive for people to buy things in the shops, then you're leaving them with less disposable income for other things. So therefore you are essentially increasing their taxes. It's just by proxy, not directly. That's right. And it is basic economics. I mean, obviously, until you actually see it, you can't be certain that businesses aren't going to absorb the tax hit.

7:44We said on this podcast that we thought it would be passed on in the form of higher prices. And indeed, that is what has happened. And one of the things that appears to be happening, which the Bank of England's chief economist warned about yesterday, which is quite interesting, is he warned that he also thought that these price rises would feed through or were feeding through to slightly higher wage settlements, that he thought that wages were also proving to be stickier than many of his colleagues on the Bank of England. were hoping for or assuming. And that does again appear to be the case. If you look at, for example, the services inflation element, some of that will be higher than perhaps expected wage increases being passed through in terms of service prices.

8:42And shall we talk, given you've just mentioned the chief economist at the Bank of England, Hugh Pell, about the last time we had the latest kind of MPC, this meeting of nine people who decide what happens with interest rates. The last meeting they had, they decided to cut rates from 4.5 % to 4.25%. But there was a really interesting division in the voting of that, wasn't there? So you had five who voted for this quarter point cut. Then you had two who voted for that half point cut, and then two who voted for it to stay at 4.5%. One of those people being Hugh Pill. So there's there this interesting division there about what actually should happen with interest rates?

9:26Yes. And I mean, we talked about it actually, again, this split, because it was a particularly strong, you know, to have such division, you know, two of the members of the Monetary Policy Committee, including Hugh Peel, saying there should be no change, a tiny majority wanting just a quarter percent cut. That's what happened. But then two, including a guest on this podcast, Svati Dhingra saying that actually the economy needed to be stimulated more and she wanted a half percent cut. I had sort of conflicting views on this because on the one hand, when you see that kind of split, it makes it very hard, whether you're a business trying to work out, you know, how much you should borrow, whether you're a consumer or a householder wondering, is this the moment to refinance my mortgage?

10:17Is this the time to lock in interest rates? When you see that kind of division on the Bank of England, it's unsettling because it makes it much harder to sort of predict the pace of interest rate cuts. And what to do. And exactly what to do with your finances. So that's the one argument against seeing those sorts of divisions on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee and sort of maybe arguing that either they should reach a consensus view and pretend they're all agreed. Or just not tell us how it went. Or stop publishing exactly these different votes. The other argument is that you need robust public debate to stop the Bank of England making serious mistakes.

11:01And it seems to me, looking at Hugh Pell, who, as you mentioned, is the chief economist there, behaviour, that he seems to have slightly changed his views about this. So he gave this very interesting speech yesterday And he says in that speech that he argued a couple of years ago that it was too early to start cutting interest rates and that he wanted to see interest rates a little bit higher to really squash inflation. And that since then, he's been a bit concerned that interest rates have been cut a bit too rapidly. I mean, you could say that on the basis of today's inflation figures that maybe he got that right, that there is a bit too much inflation still in the system.

11:41But what's really striking about Hugh Pell is that for the first couple of years when he was in that job, even though he seems to have disagreed with the majority view on the Monetary Policy Committee, he voted with them because he obviously thought that he needed to somehow show sort of solidarity with the majority view. But that's not the point of voting, is it? The whole point is to give your opinion. I think that's right. Remember, the Monetary Policy Committee consists of two different groups. There are full-time employees who are lifers. He's not an actual Bank of England lifer, but technically he is because he's properly on the staff.

12:22He runs their economics department. But then there are professional economists, usually academics, but not always, who are appointed for a fixed term to the Monetary Policy Committee. And they are not Bank of England people. And I think he thought that as a Bank of England, a proper Bank of England employee, he had to show solidarity with the governor and the deputy governors. And therefore, he didn't dissent in public in the way that actually more recently, so we just mentioned, in the last meeting, He was one of the minority of two who didn't want to cut interest rates. So he's obviously changed his mind.

12:56He's obviously taken the view that he has got to start showing when he disagrees with his colleagues. And in fact, his speech yesterday, which now looks very, very timely, really massively showed how much he is detached in terms of his outlook from many of his colleagues. because it is all about why he thinks that there is more inflation still in the system than they plainly did. It's now fairly clear that certainly at this particular juncture, he's probably won the argument because these inflation figures do, as I say, somewhat reinforce his idea that the battle against inflation is not over.

13:42and that in particular wages are proving, I mean, it's always painful to say this because obviously we want wages to go up so that people's living standards rise. But if they're fueling inflation, it becomes a vicious cycle that in the end hurts everybody because interest rates stay higher for longer and the economy is more sluggish for longer. It is striking, despite the fact that unemployment is rising a bit and numbers of vacancies are falling, that nonetheless pay rises are not coming down all that fast. Of course, the other thing which is quite interesting about all of this is that this stickiness in wages also coincides with a significant fall in immigration.

14:26Yes. Because even though we've had these new announcements from the government on restricting immigration, immigration numbers are currently coming down really quite fast because, actually, of changes made by the previous government. And one of the questions I ask myself is, with that very significant fall in immigration, are we in fact seeing employers who now can't employ cheaper people from abroad being forced to pay the indigenous population more? In many ways, for the medium term, that's a very good thing. But it does show you that when you move from one structural condition in the economy, which is a lot of people coming in from abroad, some of them low wage rates, you know, the transition to a world in which there's less immigration can be quite painful.

15:18Yeah, I was talking to an engineering boss about this yesterday. And in particular, we were talking about welders needed in shipbuilding on the Clyde and how a lot of the people have been doing that have been coming over from the Philippines to do it. and there's a real concern now that a there aren't enough welders anyway but b it's going to really hit the small and medium-sized companies because they don't tend to import labour but because the bigger companies now won't import labour and will try and take people domestically they are going to leave people in the supply chain the small and medium-sized businesses in a real talent crisis of not being able to get the people they need because the bigger companies will probably come and get them all from the smaller companies in the supply chain.

16:04And that has got to, you know, if you're a welder now, ask for more money because you're going to get it. Because that's, you know, the situation we're in is there's big gaps in skills, particularly in these sectors. And if we're seeing more money for defence and more money for construction and things like that, but we haven't got the people we need. It takes four years to train a welder, three to four years. you know and if you're talking plumbing electricians again you're talking three to four years so there's that lag where these people who are trained in these skills are going to be able to ask for a lot more money and then there's simply not enough of them anyway you're absolutely right to you know highlight in just one area yeah you know what the implication is going to be for the employers we were all a bit relieved a few days ago when we saw first quarter growth coming in better than pretty much everybody expected, that 0.7 % increase in the first three months of this year.

17:05And the government was pleased because they thought maybe the long period of bumping along the bottom was gradually coming to an end. They hoped it would show their critics that they hadn't done as much damage as their critics. Tory party before have been alleging. The concern today, though, is when the Bank of England makes a judgment about whether growth is inflationary or not, it's all based on how much spare capacity there is in the economy. It's about whether or not the growth is driven by supply, which is businesses in volume terms, as it were, being able to produce more. Or whether it is being driven by demand, which is customers of all sorts buying more than our industries and our service suppliers are able to supply without putting up prices.

18:11It's all about essentially what the underlying growth rate of the economy is. And the thing that is obviously slightly worrying about these inflation figures is they raise the concern that that rate of growth was faster than the UK economy can stand in a non-inflationary way. Right. Because the key metric in terms of what's going to make us wealthy in the long term. Yeah. Is how fast can the economy grow without putting up inflation? Yeah. Right. And the concern is we all thought yippee 0.7 percent, you know, and that could, if it's sustainable, lead at last to recovery and living standards. But if it now turns out that that is demand led beyond the capacity of the economy to meet that demand in a non-inflationary way, then we are going to have to get used to, again, to an extent forced by the Bank of England not cutting interest rates fast enough, to lower growth again until investment actually leads to higher productivity.

19:21And also there's a lot of stuff pinned to the industrial strategy going forward as well in terms of what that's actually going to mean. Should we go to a quick break? And then we need to talk a bit more about what's going on in America, don't we? And also this leaked memo from Angela Irna to Rachel Reeves. Which has got you very excited, hasn't it? Raging! When you read that, you were not a happy buddy. Why is the incentive to do well in life? Anyway, right. We'll have a quick break and then we'll chat about that. Welcome back to The Rest is Money with me, Robert Peston. And me, Steph McGovern.

19:56So Angela Rayner's got your goat. Yeah, I do. I've always liked Angela Rayner. I've got on with her over the years. But this has annoyed me. So this is news that Angela Rayner, apparently, according to The Telegraph, sent a secret memo to Rachel Reeves before the spring statement when we had these announcements about spending cuts and cuts to welfare. Angela was proposing an alternative, which was basically a tax raid on savers. So things like reinstating the pensions lifetime allowance that we've talked about before, which is where you cap the amount workers can save into a pension before they face a tax charge.

20:40It was something that Jeremy Hunt got rid of when he was Chancellor. And we talked, hadn't we, in a previous episode about Rachel Reeves considering bringing that back, removing inheritance tax relief on AIM shares. And these AIM shares, just to remind people, these are tradable shares, but they tend to be in riskier, smaller companies. Yes, and then closing a loophole, which you have on stamp duty for commercial property, raising the bank surcharge, removing the dividend allowance, tax relief on that, increasing the annual tax on envelope dwellings. I don't know what's an envelope dwelling. I don't actually know what is an envelope dwelling.

21:18I don't know. We must find that out. But that's only going to raise 200 million, according to her memo anyway. But the point for me with this is, is that sense of hitting the people who are trying to do better in life. So my beef is around. We do have a welfare problem. We know that. It's an area we are spending an incredible amount of money on, billions of pounds, and it's only going up at the moment. So we do need to tackle that. I don't necessarily agree that we've done it the right way with what Rachel Reeves did announce. But I feel like the incentive to do well in life, the incentive to save, has been demolished by Labour.

21:57Like, I don't feel like we are encouraged to do well. You know, I come from an area, as I've talked about a million times, you're probably all sick of me saying this, but, you know, Middlesbrough is an area with high deprivation. And I really saw earning money as a way to get out of that and a way to do well. And I'm a really prudent saver and investor and everything else. And it's so unfair to be constantly the people who are hit by this. So I do think that what you've hit on is really, really important, particularly now, which is if taxes do need to go up, what are the taxes that you can increase that don't have a negative impact on particularly investment?

22:43Because we do need investment to increase the productive capacity of the economy and allow the economy to grow faster, which means wages can rise and we can all be a bit better off. And so, you know, if you look at Angela Rayner's proposals, you could argue that the inheritance tax relief on AIM shares would discourage people investing in the kind of businesses we need, particularly younger, smaller entrepreneurial businesses that we need to help improve living standards. I don't know enough about whether the commercial property stamp duty loophole, as described by her, if you close that, whether that would mean that we would have less construction of essentially commercial buildings that we need again to stimulate growth.

23:42It may be one of those loopholes because there are always tax breaks that are essentially pointless from an economic point of view. And so I just don't know enough about what kind of damage that would have on the kind of infrastructure investment we need. But if you take something like the pensions lifetime allowance, right. So the estimate is that will save or make the Treasury£800 million a year. But what we've seen when this cap has been in before is it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get more money because people change their behaviour to avoid tax charges. So what we saw with this one, and it's why Jeremy Hunt then abolished it, was particularly in the NHS, you'd get consultants retiring early so that they didn't go beyond the threshold.

24:33Yeah, that was the big driver. And as you said, he looked at trying to do a special exemption for doctors for a whole variety of reasons, even though there is, funnily enough, I think, an exemption for judges or there was an exemption for judges. He decided it was better to abolish it in the round. Look, in the end, you know, I think one takes the view that as long as you can raise enough money to pay your public services, you want, you know, a simpler tax system. And I think, you know, there is an argument for saying any kind of lifetime limit of that sort will distort behavior in ways that may end up being damaging.

25:09I suppose the thing I would like your view on, though, which is not weirdly in a way on Angela Rayner's list, is the thing that the Treasury is looking at is abolishing the income tax break on cash that you put into an ISA. Yeah. So basically you can save, I'm sure everybody knows,£20 ,000 a year in an ISA and pay no income tax on the interest. And actually in this period of higher interest rates that we've been living through, that's been very valuable to, you know, millions of savers. But there are two arguments against essentially giving that tax break. One is that it's a tax break for essentially middle class people, because on the whole, it's middle class people who have the capacity to save£20 ,000 a year.

26:01And, you know, the argument is, why do they need that reward? What is the productive purpose of that reward? So one of the things that the previous government was looking at, and we've discussed it, is whether to essentially focus ISAs on investments in shares. and in particular whether to focus the ISA tax breaks on investments in British shares because one of the problems that British companies have had has been the decline in the relative value of British shares and that has been driven by the fact that pension funds have massively decreased their investments in British companies and so the idea is if you basically give to British savers a more limited range of options about where they can get their tax breaks.

26:52And one of those limited options would be putting money into the British stock market, whether that would lead to a lot more British money going into British shares, which would push up valuations, which would mean that the cost for British companies of raising money would fall and that would be good for investment. Yeah. So I kind of half agree in the sense of I think you're right. We do need to encourage more people to put their money into businesses and a tax free incentive through stocks and shares. ISA is a way of doing that. There's a communication and language issue around risk, though.

27:30And, you know, I'm like an ISA queen. Every year I'm like working out my ISAs and the ones that are doing the best are the stocks and shares one. By a country mile, I'm getting returns of like 40 odd percent on those ones, whereas I'm getting like three, four, five percent on the cash ones. But can I stop you for a second? You know, unless you are very untypical. Yes. In your stocks and shares, ISA, most of that money will have been going to America. Yeah, it is the magnificent seven. It totally is. So when things went crazy over the last few weeks, I did see it go down, but it still went down to 20 percent returns.

28:07So even at its worst, when everyone was like, oh, my God, Apple's going to die, all these companies are going to disappear, it was still getting 20 % returns because you've got to think about these in the long term. Look, in a world where money is tight for the government, and it massively is tight for the government, the question is, should they, in effect, be subsidising the banks? That's one question. And I think there is an argument that says, actually, what is the point of giving a tax break for cash investments? Now, I think there's a very strong argument for giving tax breaks for investments in the way that you've been doing for investments in shares.

28:48But it's all going to America. But then there's a separate question. And actually partly because apart from anything else, the return that you have been made, you know, if you really want to have an impact on people's wealth and, you know, how much they're going to have to pay for their retirements. Frankly, this is not rocket science. You absolutely want them to invest in the stock market because over the long term, the returns on the stock market are way higher than the returns on cash. Which gets eaten by inflation anyway. So just in the round, from one public policy point of view, better to give tax breaks to encourage people to invest in shares.

29:26But then there's a question of why not, frankly, limit those tax breaks to investments in the UK economy? because I suspect that if you had been told you could only get these returns on investments in British shares, you would have put a different pot of money in American shares that wouldn't have got the tax breaks because you're still going to get the returns. But you would have put your 20 grand into British shares. And that, I think, would have been a good thing. It is, it is. But I think you're going to de-incentivise people to save if you only do it on the basis of putting money into British shares.

30:01I absolutely agree with you that British companies need more investment and support. But if you're pitching it to consumers who are risk averse, they're going to go, oh no, I'm not going to because I'll lose all my money. And they're not going to put it necessarily into cash savings where they have to pay tax on it. There's a real incentive of thinking you're getting something for nothing. And if you take that away, people might then go, well, I'm not going to bother saving. And by the time I've paid the tax on it, inflation is totally going to have eaten it. And therefore I'll dispend it or I won't save at all.