Inflation flies to 8 percent and brings Italy back almost forty years: the prices of the shopping cart run

UDINE. The rush of consumer prices in Italy “represents a further leap back in time”, observes Confcommercio after the release of Istat estimates for June with the highest inflation since 1986 “and it is not consoling to know that the Italian data is aligned” with eurozone.

According to the Confcommercio research office, “it becomes increasingly complicated to hypothesize a return of inflationary tensions in the short term” and consequently the possibility of an inflation, on average in 2022, higher than 7% and of a return very gradual in 2023, with inevitable heavy effects on disposable income and on the purchasing power of wealth held in liquid form by households, with consequent negative effects on spending behavior “.

According to Confcommercio “if at the moment the effects on consumption still appear limited, it is very likely that from September families will be forced to select purchases, with serious negative effects on consumption and, therefore, on GDP”.

Istat reports, in particular, in June, the acceleration of the prices of fresh and refrigerated fruit (from + 6% to + 10.9% per year) and of those of fresh or refrigerated vegetables other than potatoes (from + 11% at + 11.8%).

Food prices also increased, both processed (from + 6.6% to + 8.2%) and unprocessed (from + 7.9% to + 9.6%) as well as the prices of recreational, cultural and for personal care (from + 4.4% to + 5%) and transport-related services (from + 6% to +7.2 percent). On an annual basis, moreover, both the prices of goods (from + 9.7% to + 11.4%) and those of services (from + 3.1% to + 3.4%) accelerate; therefore, the negative inflation differential between the latter and the prices of goods widens (from -6.6 in May to -8 percentage points). The inflation acquired for 2022 is equal to + 6.4% for the general index and + 2.9% for the core component.

Inflation, therefore, brings Italy back to 36 years ago, when we looked at Top Gun and the debut of Tom Cruise at the cinema, just like today the sequel to the aces of US aviation. We admired world champion Argentina thanks to the genius of Maradona and also to that goal, to that hand of God that this year was the fil rouge of the splendid film by Paolo Sorrentino in the Oscar nomination.

And if prices return to the levels of almost 40 years ago, that fear of war that touched us then with Gaddafi’s missiles on Lampedusa after the American raid on Tripoli has become a reality.

But now, as at that time, the terror comes from Ukraine, today attacked by Russia, of which in 1986 it was the western rib from which the radioactive wave of the Chernobyl power plant originated. The toxic cloud, denied by what was still the Soviet Union, had erupted a few kilometers from Kiev, today bombed by Moscow on 26 April. For the rest, little has returned, for better or for worse, of those eighties full of reaganomics and disengagement.

The period of hedonism and fun, very far from the pandemic and the war, from drought and from the grasshoppers that follow one another like the biblical plagues of Egypt in our present time. Berlusconi became president of Milan and who knows maybe he was already thinking about the presidency of the Council. In January 1986 Spain and Portugal had entered a united Europe which was not yet a Union, however, and had less than half of the current member countries.

And if this year inflation makes our wrists tremble, this was not the most felt problem almost forty years ago: a few years earlier, in 1980, the consumer price index had jumped over 21% and was worthwhile. more being among the bot people than investing elsewhere. Treasury bills at six or three months yielded more than 10%, dragging the crowding out phenomenon into a downward phase. Of course the public debt was starting to rise but it was not yet the Himalayan mountain to climb that we have before us now.

Spending on interest weighed, however, it grew a little more and in any case in line with the other big Europeans that on some occasions we were even preparing to exceed by GDP produced, as in the case of the United Kingdom the following year. We came from the years of lead but we did not miss the scandals, such as the methanol wine as well as the mysteries from the first Republic. That year it was Michele Sindona’s turn to die in prison immediately after his sentence drinking a cup of cyanide coffee.

On the health front we did not wear masks but nevertheless began to come to terms with the ‘mad cow’, the disease of beef detected at the beginning in Great Britain. Boys and comic book lovers began to meet Dylan Dog in the autumn of 1986 while the English royal house still offered us cover news that year thanks to the wedding of Elizabeth II’s second son, Prince Andrew, to the redhead Sarah Ferguson. .

The relations between the Russians and the Americans went instead to the opposite of the headlines of today: this year they touched on the direct confrontation on the border of the former Iron Curtain then instead they tried to reconnect with the historic meeting in Reykjavik between Ronald Reagan and Michail Gorbachev. It was the eve of the implosion of the USSR, which would have led someone to believe in the end of history, in the unipolar world, in globalization and in an expansive monetary policy that between one financial crisis and another seemed destined to be endless except instead awakening in 2022 with a NATO-Russia opposition that has even gone back 80 years and an energy shock inflation that after the 1970s has returned to make us talk about rationing and austerity. Everything changes, everything comes back.