Aurelia Butler

The UK is “over the worst” of soaring food price inflation, according to the head of Ocado, but the online grocer warned that it would take time for prices to moderate. Tim Steiner, the group’s chief executive and co-founder, said interest rate rises, greater mortgage costs and higher wages would continue to put pressure on prices. But he added: “We are definitely over the worst in my opinion.” “I think we need to see interest rates ideally stabilise and come down before we can start to see that inflation will actually start to go back down. But I don’t see it going up from where it is now,” he said on Tuesday. Steiner’s view that inflation has peaked follows similar remarks from other retail executives, raising hopes that the UK — which has experienced western Europe’s highest rate of food inflation — will finally see some relief. Tesco chief executive Ken Murphy recently said he believed “we’re past the peak inflation” while J Sainsbury head Simon Roberts said earlier this month that “food inflation is starting to fall”.UK grocery price inflation eased for a fourth consecutive month in July, according to data published by research company Kantar. The annual pace of grocery price inflation eased to 14.9 per cent in the four weeks to July 9, down from 16.5 per cent in the previous month.Steiner’s remarks came as Ocado reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of £16.6mn for the six months to May 28. The group said its technology business had been profitable for the first time.Revenue increased by 8.6 per cent to £1.37bn. Ocado shares were up 14 per cent in morning trading. The company still recorded a pre-tax loss of £289.5mn, up 37 per cent year on year, but stuck to its annual guidance. Its shares have lost two-thirds of their value over the past two years, after hitting a record high during the pandemic-driven boom in online shopping.Ocado runs an online supermarket in the UK in partnership with Marks and Spencer and also sells its technology to other retailers around the world to enable them to sell goods online.Steiner pushed back at suggestions that retailers were raising prices beyond the heightened input costs of raw materials and wages.

“When you look at the overall margins to the sector, I think calling it profiteering is really not sensible,” he said, adding that the sector had to cope with substantially rising commodity prices as well as energy and labour costs. “I think grocers have worked enormously hard as a sector to keep those price rises to a minimum for the UK consumer,” he said.Ocado shares surged last month after rumours that it could be a bid target for Amazon. “Speculation is speculation,” said Steiner. “Whenever any offer comes, as a management team and board I’ve got responsibilities to take this seriously.”“But it’s not something I’m out pursuing,” he added. More

Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Napoleon crossing the alps. The enduring achievements of the former French leader are largely bureaucratic, not military, successes To judge by the trailer, Ridley Scott’s biopic of Napoleon will entertain, inspire and extravagantly miss the point. But then so did the paintings of the same subject by Jacques-Louis David. Napoleon wasn’t, or wasn’t just, a conqueror. He was, over and above all else, history’s greatest bureaucrat. What survives of him isn’t the French empire (which he left smaller than he found it) but the Banque de France, standardised education, prefects who keep French regions in line with Parisian diktat and a Civil Code that still influences jurisdictions around the world. To this day, the adjective “Napoleonic” describes something centralised and perhaps officious, not something martial.Prepare for a Napoleonic world, then. The most important governmental trend today is the rise of protectionism. In the US, Europe, China and India, the state is turning from open trade to the cultivation of domestic industries. One justification is strategic: don’t count on frail or hostile regimes for essential goods. Another is progressive: give skilled manual labour a break for once. Both trace back to the election-winning arguments of Donald Trump in 2016.And so we have something of an irony to chew on. Populism, which sets itself against the elite, against the “deep state”, is going to leave it more powerful, not less. The technocrat, vilified so recently, will be the string-pulling figure of our age, dispensing subsidies, guiding this economic sector, shunning that one. Corporate leaders will have an ever tighter and more collusive relationship with government, not as a corrupt byproduct of the system but as a central feature of it. Populism was meant to take the governing class down a peg or two. Its main legacy will be something close to the opposite.When would you rather be a politician or civil servant: now, when you might shape a whole industry, or in pre-populist times? When would you rather be a lobbyist in the “swamp”: during the laissez-faire age, when government and business were at least nominally distinct, or the protectionist one, when no sector wants to miss out on public largesse? (If chipmaking is strategic, why not agriculture?) The elites are going to be stronger and more incestuous as a result of populism, a movement dedicated to their downfall. Perhaps we should have seen the paradox coming. Populists have a rebellious style but a paternalist agenda. They hate the so-called blob, but want it to shape much of the private sector. They resent elites, but more often for abdicating power — over markets, over national borders — than for hoarding it. They have a thing for direct democracy but also for Singapore. This is a movement that was always in two minds on the question of faceless authority.The contradiction is most obvious on the US right. Trump apparatchiks dream of taming the deep state if their man gets to govern again. So-called Schedule F appointments would make it easier to fire civil servants. In an executive branch version of what the right has done to the judiciary over several decades, partisan cadres are being groomed for bureaucratic posts throughout Washington.At the same time, the Trump world demands more industrial strategy. Is there a record of it being done well, anywhere on Earth, without a permanent, independent bureaucracy, licensed to plan and invest regardless of the churn of elected administrations?At some point, demagogues will have to choose which they hate more: free trade or the blob. Curbing the one tends to empower the other. Notice that, though Trump started the move to industrial protection, it has achieved real substance under a centre-left government. The right could never follow its antitrade logic to its natural conclusion, which is the aggrandisement of officialdom. Trump managed to fall out with the national security state, of all things. The idea that he could abide a US version of Japan’s former, and lordly, Ministry of International Trade and Industry, is fanciful. Yet that kind of technocratic power is what, via the hand of his successor Joe Biden, populism has inadvertently created.I fear, though cannot know, that we are living through the biggest wrong turn in government policy of my lifetime. A decade into this protectionist age, we might regret the waste, the pork, the higher consumer prices (do “workers” not pay those?) and the fragmentation of the west into squabbling trade zones. But the wrongness of this trend is another column. For now, what stands out is the improbable winner of it. Imagine being told in 2016 that elites would have more clout, not less, and owe it to their own [email protected] More

Referring to the possibility of further rate hikes, Knot said: “For July it is a necessity, for anything beyond July it would at most be a possibility, but by no means a certainty.””We have to carefully watch what the data tells us. So far, we’ve been mainly preoccupied with the risk of inflation persistence. But the balance of risks is gradually shifting, and the risk of perhaps doing too much needs to be paid more attention to,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. More

(Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said a cooling — but not faltering — labor market is playing a leading role in helping slow inflation, among a raft of factors imposing disinflationary pressures, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.Yellen also told Bloomberg in an interview on Monday that the United States was making good progress in bringing inflation down and she did not expect the U.S. economy to enter a recession. More

GANDHINAGAR, India (Reuters) – Multilateral development banks must create a new funding mechanism and triple sustainable lending by 2030 to eliminate poverty and achieve climate goals, a G20 panel said in a report on Tuesday that called for big changes in the way MDBs operate.The independent panel, headed by economists Lawrence Summers and N.K. Singh, was commissioned by the Group of 20 nations to propose reforms for MDBs.”Individually and collectively, MDBs must become effective agents in all developing countries for integrating the development and climate change agendas,” said the report, which was tabled during the G20 finance meeting in India’s western state of Gujarat.Excluding China, which has sufficient domestic resources to finance its transition to clean energy, the panel estimated that developing countries would need to spend an additional $3 trillion annually by 2030 to cover investments in climate action and meet their development goals. Of this, the report said around $1.8 trillion should go towards sustainable infrastructure, a four-fold increase since 2019, while $1.2 trillion would be needed to achieve other goals, including a 75% increase in spending on health and education.”The international development finance system should be designed to support this spending by providing $500 billion in additional annual official external financing by 2030, of which one-third (should be) in concessional and non-debt creating financing and two-thirds in the form of non-concessional official lending,” the report said.MDBs, like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, must work with governments and the private sector to reduce, share and manage risks and thus bring down the cost of capital, it said.It also said that MDBs should provide an incremental $260 billion of additional annual official financing, of which $200 billion should be in non-concessional lending, and help mobilise and catalyse private finance.The G20 will continue to work towards resolving differences in helping low-income countries manage their debt burdens and free up funding for climate financing.Countries like Zambia and Ghana have been waiting for big creditors to make progress in providing debt relief under the so called “Common Framework”, which is led by the G20.Global creditors, debtor nations and international financial institutions agreed in April to galvanise the Common Framework – a platform supposed to speed up and simplify the process of getting financially ailing economies back on their feet.Zambia, locked in default for almost three years, struck a deal last month to restructure $6.3 billion in debt owed to governments abroad including China, but many challenges remain. More