Topic: Euro zone inflation hit a new record high of 5% in December (Read 356 times)

At the end of the day if you buy when it is going down, the worst case is that it could go even lower but you will wait and make a profit when it goes up, the best case it goes up right away. I do not see any problems with any sides and it is a win-win situation. Buy low and sell high, we should always remember that.

You already bought bitcoin and you have made a great decision with it, that is why there is absolutely no need for any of us to do anything extra, it is just a superbly interesting thing to watch some people who "get it" as in understand the market, whereas some do not know how it works. It is shocking to still see people who see price going down and selling and getting out, it is not really reasonable to expect something like that if you ask me.

I also don't see any other way that can save us! Inflation in my country is up even higher, the prices of basics are higher... everyone says it will hit the poorest, as always! We had problems before this crazy pandemic, but now the only thing I see is the mass confusion, and of course, in all that mess some billionaires are just getting richer!
Time to buy more Bitcoin, time to get some bag of some decentralized alts... I guess their time is coming because this system will explode, sooner or later!

We must understand that regular people have relinquished the control of their finances to governments and banks, so they trust that they will somehow solve the crisis that is coming and they avoid being affected by it, however if they had at least some historic memory they will know that there is an important economic crisis every decade, which shows that governments and banks not only will not protect them but will throw them under the bus when the time comes.

I guess you're right. I have bought already mine when bitcoin dipped at 40k and so far, I do love the growth that my bitcoin has taken when the market price has gone back up again, don't plan to sell mine anytime soon, just accumulate more so I can enjoy bigger profits when bitcoin starts going up towards the moon again.

Currently, the most talked-about issue is inflation. You know, Inflation in the Eurozone has risen sharply in the past months. If we talk about eurozone inflation then we should know from the beginning that the eurozone is a kind of association of nineteen European Union which is the common and the only currency used as a financial unit.

Inflation has pushed up the prices of fuel, alcohol, and cigarettes, as well as the prices of basic necessities, which have led to the suffering of the common man. According to a study, prices in the European Union rose by an average of 1.9 percent in June but rose to 2.1 percent in July. According to Eurostat, the current eurozone inflation rate is much higher than the target of 2 percent set by the central bank.

Again, Bullshit!!!!
1) Many times lower than LNG? You either don't know what many times means or you don't have a clue about the prices, as usual.
2) What rules were introduced?
3) When did they ask that?
4) Why is then Russia still selling gas to Europe?

The inflation around eurozone is found to be the highest since 1997. Based on different sources, on the top list of inflated countries Lithuania tops with 9.3% which is very big. Followed is Estonia with 8.3%, Belgium with 7.1% and Germany with 6%. Amongst Germany is facing its 29 years high inflation, though it has one of the best economies.

High energy price is mentioned as the reason for the inflation by majority of the countries. Being an automobile dominant country German seems to face the hard time. Around the eurozone protests have been breaking as a result of high inflation. Particularly people want to tackle the situation and for the new covid variant restrictions were made by the governments. This once again will ruin the economy. To lower down the inflation it won't happen in a short, expect the recovery after years.

It is very simple. Russia provides natural gas to the European Union at reasonable prices (the price of piped natural gas is many times lower than that of LNG). The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was planned many years ago and the necessary approvals were given at that time. But then the EU leaders decided to play politics. They introduced rules specifically targeting Gazprom, and many of the countries (such as Poland) imposed unfair fines on the company. Finally Russia decided that enough is enough and asked the Europeans to source their natural gas from elsewhere.

It doesn't "directly" impact it, but when you have fiat getting worthless, do you really think that house prices would stay the same? Right now %5 increase in inflation doesn't have to be 5% increase in housing prices, all of it depending on which nation, which town, which street and what condition and all of that of course.

However, the reality is that we are talking about something that is still possible in the future to price in together. Like there is a house with 100k value, it doesn't have to be 105k right away, but if it happens again then maybe it will go from 100k to 110k suddenly, because it will wait for a few more years. All in all if the prices keep getting higher and higher for everything else, then houses will definitely increase in value eventually.

The say 5 percent and we all know the inflation rate is much higher than this official 5 percent they said here we can recognize the inflation rate from the gas price we see and the food price for sure I think time after time we will see more inflation rate in the world the reason is clear and that's because of unlimited total money supply and printing worthless money paper every day without of any value that's the reason for many people to stop holding money and start investing on bitcoin, stocks, and gold.

These mutations are going to be endless and I think that's for sure. But hopefully, the last mutations would be not that strong anymore but it seems that they keep on upgrading from every variant that it becomes.

I doubt that these variants of concern are the signs of the beginning of the end. We're not yet there and that's for sure, one variant might end into a certain country but it would become a vital and concern to another country.

Bullllllllllllllllsshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiit!!!
If the problem was Nordstream 2 why weren't there any problems last year or a decade ago when there was no Nord Stream at all? The problems are because Russia tries to impose its views on Ukraine and NATO and uses gas as a blackmail technique. So if there is anybody to blame is commie ass licking friends!


If Europe as a whole would't have stopped building nuclear reactors we wouldn't have this problem right now, but when Germany invest billions in solar panels for 3 hours of peak sun a day on average, this is what we got.
But yeah, with spring things will start to come back to normal, there is one major hop in February when usually there are a few cold waves but after that everything south of the Alps and Carpathians won't require heating at all and the rest will stop consuming around May. By that time gas can't go longer up and even oil, it can't push another 10% every quarter.

Poeple should understand that this is not month on month it's over a year, you won't see this spike again, there is simply no reason for it to happen.


Yeah, just as the -20C two days ago were definitely because of global warming.
This is because of the morons and their green politics who shut down coal powerplants and nuclear reactors only to find out that half of Europe is not really suitable for solar or wind and we only have one damn major river in the whole union for hydro.


Wait till Belchatow shuts down! 

Not really. It's more an effect of the policies that have been taken because of the supposed climate apocalypse. Not an effect of warming as such. And then there is something else that has nothing to do with warming but also influences energy prices: the closure of nuclear power plants. Germany is closing its own (as are many other countries), while China plans to open 150.

This must be an effect of global warming as a whole. Imagine having the energy prices rising possibly because of the lack of resources now, and the oil industry is the leader in the energy sector now depleting. To save themselves, they want more money so that when it finally becomes zero, they would still be rich AF. The bank and the economy have seen the highest rise in prices because of this pandemic and the surprises of what the world is becoming into.

Inflation doesn't necessarily translate to increase in housing prices, pretty sure that it's more on the goods and services. That's actually a pretty good deal in my opinion, compare that to my country that doesn't have a good wages and at the same time doesn't have a good loan system, I think that I would take that any other day.

I'm not worrying much about inflation because interest rates remain very low.
If you want to buy a house in France or Germany, it's still possible to get a 15-year loan below 2%.
This has to change!

This is not looking good for world economies.

Pretty much every single country is on the verge of a serious inflationary crisis and people are not panicking because they trust the government too much.

The current sell-off in fiat hedges like BTC make absolutely no sense for this reason. It is essentially the only safe haven other than precious metals that you should be parking your funds in.

That's quite concerning for the economy. The rates will eventually have to go up to stop the inflation and when they do go up, it will crash the stock markets everywhere in the world. The central banks are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The economy was shut down for a year in 2020 and the FED printed billions of dollars so people don't die of hunger. They didn't die of hunger in 2020 indeed but now lots of people will suffer from high inflation or recession soon. You just can't expect everything to go back to normal after shutting the economy for a year.

It was not too long that the Eurozone and nearby countries were discussing how negative inflation would be a terrible thing, resulting in stagnation like we saw in Japan in recent decades. Inflation can be accommodated but there is every possibility that it is transitionary as so many central banks like to call it. The world has been turned upside down through the pandemic of the last two years, we saw oil prices go negative - meaning producers were paying people to take it because there was no storage capacity left. We also saw factories and industry close down, then suddenly have to ramp up again a few months later with a whole heap of people with savings and wanting to spend. 5% would actually be a rather good thing if it was able to keep that low and shows that the Eurozone is rather privileged with that degree of stability.

One of the things we need to understand is that if governments are willing to recognize that the inflation is that high then the real inflation is even higher, so the situation is way worse than what they are admitting, so I do not think there is a chance the current inflation will come under control during the next years, and there is a significant risk that things become even worse as the pandemic is not going anywhere and it is still slowing down the economy.

The Omicron variant is certainly making the situation worse, however, I highly doubt it that it's going to be the last one. On the other hand, due to its extremely high transmission, experts are believing that it's the beginning of the end. No more lockdowns are going to happen, only a few of them occurred in Europe, but austerity measures are going to be imposed, as an effort to control the pandemic.

Inflation is a necessary evil. But more than 10%?? This will not only break the whole economy but at the same time the governmental system will collapse harder than anything. There are many things wrong as we know it but controlling inflation seems to be something that government is not being able to do. Honestly it's only going to be bad for the middle class people because the government will still get taxes and revenues they are not letting people off the hook for that, are they now. Plus it's even worse with the pandemic since people don't have a job anymore, most of them are fighting for their rights as well, people are resigning, not all the countries do get money from the government as well, only the very developed ones are capable of doing that.

I honestly do not think that inflation is the real matter, corruption is definitely the key answer.
There are some European nations with semi-dictators as well, and big corruption no matter which party is at the top on that election. This causes the whole euro currency to get impacted, we have a lot more poor people and a lot more wealthy corrupted officials or their families or whatever.

This is why do not imagine Germany or France whenever you think about euro, remember that there are much smaller places out there. Inflation could be 10% and you could still manage to make the nation better, or inflation could be 2% and you could still be a bad nation, that is not the main reason that impacts a whole zone filled with dozens of nations.

I think it is total lockdown that affects the economy severely. There is no need for that, the vaccine is playing a huge role already stopping the contact rate. In the Omicron case, there is no total lockdown for countries who are battling with it so a new variant should also be handled same way Omicron is being handled. Total lockdown is a set back, it happened in the past when covid-19 pendamic had no vaccine but with vaccine now there is no need for shutting down the economy.

The omicron variant can possibly make it even higher or worse. We don't know if it's the last variant but there's the other one that's been found in France, the Ihu variant. And every country and region is affected of it which is mostly large countries that are also taking precaution from these variants of concern.

It will depend on how they'll deal with these variants and if they're going to implement lock downs. For sure if more lock downs are being implemented, it'll cause their economy to be slowed down and likely to increase inflation.

I expect inflation levels to continue to rise all around the world, most of this stems from the negative effects of the pandemic, as a result of lockdowns and printing quite a lot of money it was always expected that the level of inflation was going to gradually go up and that's what we're experiencing currently. It's not just in the Euro zone, even in my country, inflation level is skyrocketing and cost of living is rising daily, cost of commodities and amenities continues to go up and for now we can't see any respite in sight. In my opinion, with more strains of the virus rearing its head, there could still be more lockdowns and money printing coming ahead, thus I don't think we've seen all of this inflation, I expect it to be with us for quite a long time, and like I've always said, the developing countries are definitely going to be hit harder than the developed ones.

The Eurozone inflation heavily depends of the electricity and natural gas prices.
Germany is the biggest electricity consumer in the EU and they will shut down their nuclear reactors.
I assume that all the solar power plants in Germany will start working on full scale during the spring and summer of 2022,therefore increasing the electricity production and lowering the prices in Germany,which will influence the prices in the entire EU.
The natural gas prices will stay high until the end of 2022.The natural gas reserves of European countries are full at 75% and the prices will start dropping when they hit levels of above 90%.
A 5% inflation isn't such a big deal.Inflation hitting levels above 10% will become a problem for the households and the economy,but I don't think that the inflation in Europe will be higher than 7.5% during 2022.

A large chunk of it might have come from the exploding natural gas prices. The prices have increased by 5 to 10 times during the last 12 months, and this has translated in to higher costs for electricity. Many of the industrial facilities that were dependent on piped natural gas has shut down their operations. Anyway, the recent crisis resulted from the refusal of German government to certify the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. If they allow the pipeline to operate, then the prices will come down immediately. Just because of their ego and arrogance, they are suffering losses of billions of €€€.

If this is going to be a solution to reduce inflation, the point is whether it has worked. Yes increase in interest rate is to discourage borrowing and reduce money in circulation but that has not been working following the economic indices. I think inflation is one big challenge that the world is facing this time.

Yesterday my government mentioned an option of implementing centrally regulated praces of basic products (bread, sugar etc.). So I'm less scared of inflation now ... in scared of the collapse of small businesses, food shortages and hunger (thats how "regulated praces" usually ends)


Same here but only for individuals, not businesses, so I'll have money to buy bread but baker wont have money to produce bread, especially with centrally regulated prices (inflation goes even higher).

It looks like they do all they can to increase inflation rather than decrease it.

People are getting poor and the currency is loosing value more than ever before, it is the extreme conditions we are living in. In Turkey, the official Turkstat annual  inflation rate is 36%. By the by end of quarter 1 2022, the inflation rate is forecast to reach 45%. This is very crazy.  Aside, the obvious increase in prices of crude and natural gas responsible in part for the inflation in the euro zone, other factors include - Disruptions in supply chain due to pandemic, increase in prices of coal, labour Crisis - workers switched job during pandemic

https://m.bianet.org/english/economy/255641-annual-inflation-tops-36-percent-in-turkey-according-to-turkstat#:~:text=The%20Turkish%20Statistical%20Institute%20has,percent%20annually%20in%20December%202021.

4.8% here in Greece, gas and electricity costs have increased tremendously the past few months, while I'm now seeing Brent's oil price is also climbing again. A few weeks ago, it went below $60, but now it's up to $82/barrel. The situation is only going to get worse in the future.

The government announced that there is an effort in covering some electric costs themselves (cost of MWH), I'm still skeptical on whether and if it's going to be implemented.

P.S We also got a 2% increase in salary, from 1st of January, we're now saved.(not)

Unsurprising since Germany was around a 6% recently and is the major driver of the economy on EU and most Europe. My thoughts about this revolve about the effect on bitcoin. On one side, inflation tends to be good for assets such as bitcoin that are scarce, but, on the other side, the governments may rise interest rates, even by just a little and that will have a strong negative effect.

The new wave is already spreading which forces the country to go for another lockdown or atleast semi lockdown which means the economy will take further hit so there is no chance for the inflation to be lowered in near future and its a great achievement by the government if they keep the inflation rate at this range even though its the worst ever.

Its not getting better. Its worse and worse with every next month. In some countries inside Euro zone inflation is already above 8% (f.e my country - Poland) and I can tell you that it will only skyrock from there. Mostly because we just had +20% energy price pump and +80% gas price pump. Some companies have received a gas price increase of several hundred percent. Almost all goods and services uses energy or gas (f.e to bake a bread). This will push prices of everything higher and higher in whole 2022. IMO pick of inflation will be in the fourth quarter of 2022 and in next year if ever (hyperinflation and devaluation scenario).

I expect it to go higher. Not that it's particularly relevant, but the US's inflation rate is 7.9%, a 40 year high. Omicron, and every subsequent variant will continue to hit the global economy, and there is no sign that supply chains will relieve themselves if Covid restrictions continue, so I don't expect inflation to stabilize. If the mere announcement of new Covid variants can cause entire markets to tank, as with Omicron, the same cycle will happen with whatever the "new" variant of the quarter is.

There can't be a reasonable expectation of a 2% inflation target if governments decides to restrict it's economy for nearly 2 years by isolating workers and slowing down production.

There is possibility of higher inflation as the covid is acting at its best in the current period. With the wave of omicron the hospitals are filling up fast and thus most of the workers, job holders, labours, to professionals are getting bed ridden. This affects directly on the business for which they are working. This disturbs the way things are working for them and ultimately the income is not getting circulated. Most of the money is getting diverted into hospitals which is not really an income source for the nation as they have to payback the health care infra.

On bigger picture scale, I see this is one more wave of covid and nothing else. With the cases rising all over the world fears starting to begin and peeps are numb at what they are doing. The inflation is going hot because whole economic chain is getting disturbed again and again.

Well I don't know how inflation can be reduced in these days that the world is consistently withnessing high degree of instability resulting to printing of fiat and effect being high cost of living. The Euro zone is no different from what is happening all over the world. The world is experiencing a change occasioned by constant threat of war and building of warfare equipment, budgets are channelled into security gadgets from the threats of country to country and terrorism, bandits, etc and high level insecurity. Money made for capital projects and development that will increase returns and GDP are used to service insecurity. So inflation will most likely unfortunately stay up.

I thought 5% was considered a good inflation rate per year, but 5% in a month sounds like way too much, even for those who argue that some inflation is good to motivate people to spend money rather than hold it. Then again, Bitcoin can easily lose or gain 5% in a matter of a few days, so fiat is still way  more stable than cryptos. That being said, Bitcoin corrects itself eventually and grows in value, whereas fiat is meant to lose some value, and at times like this it simply loses more than anticipated. I think they'll be able to fix this next year, though, especially since everyone's used to the pandemic now, and fewer restrictions are being introduced even during major outbreaks.

I do not know much about the economy of the European countries, as a result of this, I do not know the extent the inflation can be, but I know the net result in long term will still be inflation, as it is happening all over in the world. The inflation again and again lead to fiat declination and the fiat purchasing power will be reduced. That is why we need to go for bitcoin or other asset that can be an hedge against fiat devaluation.

When the official inflation is that, the real inflation is even worse. The problem seems to be that the US is willing to fight inflation soon while in the Eurozone it is not clear, but if the FED really starts to act, the Eurozone will have to follow them. It should be remembered that since its creation, the ECB's most important mission has been to control inflation, while the FED, although it has also taken inflation into account, has been more focused on economic growth.

Germany has a central role in the Eurozone, and the specter of the Weimar Republic's hyperinflation (very unlikely nowadays I'd say) may force a change in monetary policy as well.

Either way, on both sides of the Atlantic, they are in a catch-22 situation. Monetary policy has led to high inflation, and with the economy relying on massive printing like a junkie relies on heroine, cutting back on buying, raising rates, etc, is clearly going to have an effect on the economy.

I guess they are going to try not to let it get out of hand anywhere, reduce the printing and hope that there is no big crisis or stock market crash, in which case they will go back to printing like there is no tomorrow.

Source https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/euro-zone-inflation-december.html?__source=iosappshare%7Ccom.apple.UIKit.activity.CopyToPasteboard

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Do you still think we can get inflation at 2% levels in the medium term with the continuation of the current policies or will we need to press the brakes hard?

Is 5% peak inflation, or will we see inflation at more than 10%?