There is a fair chance that by the time the trees come into leaf in Washington, Frankfurt and London, this decade’s inflation crisis will definitively be over. The eye of the storm has already passed and prices have been rising at rates no higher than central banks’ targets in recent months.In the six months between May and November last year, for example, the annualised rate of consumer price inflation was only 0.6 per cent in the UK and 2.7 per cent in the eurozone. Excluding volatile energy and food prices, annualised core rates of inflation were 2.4 per cent in both economic areas over the same period. In the US, the equivalent measure — the Federal Reserve’s favoured personal consumption expenditure deflator — was just 1.9 per cent with a headline rate of 2 per cent.
當華盛頓、法蘭克福和倫敦的樹木長出葉子時，本十年的通脹危機很有可能已經結束。風暴中心已經過去，近幾個月來，物價一直在以不高于央行目標的速度上漲。