{"id":505566,"date":"2026-03-31T17:31:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/505566\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T17:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:31:13","slug":"the-iran-war-is-driving-up-inflation-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/505566\/","title":{"rendered":"The Iran war is driving up inflation \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Governments, too, face a parallel dilemma, across a region where energy costs are already cripplingly high. Voters and businesses are demanding protection, but few capitals can afford the lavish subsidies that were doled out in 2022, the last time energy prices spiked.<\/p>\n

Consumer prices rose 1.2 percent on the month and by 2.5 percent from a year ago, the EU\u2019s statistical office,\u00a0Eurostat<\/a>, said Tuesday. That\u2019s up from 1.9 percent in February and a sharp deviation from the pattern of the last year, in which it has meandered gently around the ECB\u2019s target of 2 percent.<\/p>\n

The rise was entirely due to energy prices, a reflection of how quickly fuel retailers passed on the increase in world oil prices to drivers. By contrast, core inflation, which strips out prices for energy and food, actually slowed a little.<\/p>\n

Berenberg Bank analyst Felix Schmidt reckons inflation will now peak above 3 percent in the coming months, and may even rise \u201cwell above 4 percent\u201d if the war escalates any further.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the longer the war drags on, the likelier it is that the spike in oil and gas prices feeds through into prices for all other goods and services that use them.<\/p>\n

ECB officials are hoping against hope that it won\u2019t come to that. In speeches and interviews over the last couple of weeks, its top management has repeatedly made the point that the Bank won\u2019t rush<\/a> to raise interest rates in response to so-called “supply-side” events over which it has no control.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Governments, too, face a parallel dilemma, across a region where energy costs are already cripplingly high. Voters and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505567,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[894,84,13930,1294,1344,3682,3360,1431,814,585,56,54,55,636],"class_list":["post-505566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-banks","tag-business","tag-christine-lagarde","tag-economy","tag-energy","tag-energy-prices","tag-fuels","tag-inflation","tag-interest-rates","tag-iran","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505566\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}