I’ve been explaining for weeks that this could happen.
And yes, we already know that changes in inflation are already a mixture of mathematical game and real economy. Mathematical game because depending on the lurch of the same month of the previous year, in the present month we see as positive increases in percentages that seem low to us thanks to the fact that twelve months ago they were high.
But the reality is that, little by little, the supply chain is regularizing. Recently, in a meeting with 300 executives at Aecoc seafood, I launched the live survey: how many believe that cost prices are already definitively normalizing? 70% answered affirmatively.
There remain some very specific raw materials or components that may still be expensive and whose normalization takes a little longer, but, in general, the great pipeline of products, raw materials and components of international trade is being regularized.
Gas and oil are also helping at the moment. It seems that 2023, as I wrote a few weeks ago in this same column, must be the year where all the macroeconomic imbalances produced during the covid and which have been like the tsunami wave from the film The Impossible (2012), they are rebalancing.
It may still be that inflation, precisely because of this mathematical game, will experience some other upturn, but the trend is quite clear. Now it remains for the rest of the EU to follow in the footsteps of Spain. Always lagging behind in so many economic subjects, in inflation we are much better than the rest.
Of course, someone will be able to argue that inflation of 1.9% does not mean that prices are going down, but that they are already going up less and that they have not stopped going up.
Yes it’s correct. But it’s worth looking back with a little more perspective. If we see how the purchasing power of Spaniards has evolved since 2006, we will be in for a surprise. The average salary has been above inflation for many years and we reached 2019 with 7% more purchasing power.
It is true that those 7 points have been lost in two and a half years, since wages have incorporated only a part of inflation. But purchasing power, that is, our purchasing power as citizens and as a country, is similar to what it was before the bursting of the real estate and construction bubble.
That, plus the one hundred billion saved during the pandemic, explain why we grew above 2% this year.
