Quote (Djunior @ 26 May 2023 22:06)
lol wut
That's pretty much a flat line (slight increase compared to what follows) roughly May 2021 - September 2021 (still corona pandemic time)
The price drastically increases by the end of the year due to Russian energy squeeze and troop buildup on Ukrainian border in December 2021. This is related to the conflict, NOT because of the corona pandemic.
And look at the price explosion after that, lol. You can read a graph or don't you, lol
It's not a flat line. I gave you the link to the site where you can look up the actual prices at any day - natural gas prices had already more than doubled before any troop buildup on Ukraine's borders began, clearly refuting your claim that energy prices only spiked after the invasion. Likewise, the chart I posted shows that the major spikes occurred in early July (when Nord Stream 1 was shut down due to maintenance and there was uncertainty about whether it would come online again) and then around late August, when Russia started closing the gas tap altogether. By contrast, the spike after September 26 (when the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up) is miniscule, thus disproving your other claim that "prices spiked especially after NS sabotage".
The takeaway from my chart is that energy prices (and inflation) had already been creeping up a lot before the outbreak of the war. Then, there was a shortlived and mild spike in early March 2022, after the start of the invasion. Afterwards, gas prices kept creeping up for months at a roughly similar rate... until Russia started outright threatening to close the gas tap, which they eventually did. The sabotage of the NS pipelines in late September only had a marginal effect. In November and early December, there was a cold spell during which worries about gas shortages popped up again, leading to another peak of gas prices. Then, around Christmas, a spell of unusually mild weather arrived and eliminated these fears for good, at least for the winter of 2022/23. Since then, gas prices have been slowly coming back down to earth again.
Sure, the war has further fueled inflation by quite a lot, but the acute energy crisis many feared was averted. We still sit on lots of natural gas and also oil which were bought last year while prices went bonkers, so that it takes time for prices to fully normalize, but things are trending in the right direction on the energy front. Furthermore, the data clearly shows that the relevant spikes in energy prices were triggered by Russia's closing of the gas tap, rather than by talks about sanctions or by the destruction of Nord Stream. And last but not least, inflation had already picked up lots of pace before the war began. For example, US inflation rates already stood at 7.5% in January 2022.
The evidence clearly points to a two-pronged explanation for the surging inflation: the aftereffects of the covid era (money printing, missed production, disrupted supply chains) started the inflation, the war in Ukraine then exacerbated it.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 26 2023 05:05pm