Cliff Taylor

Well, we've seen inflation go up and, you know, some concerns about that.

Obviously, we had the fuel protests.

Yeah.

Government have unveiled a package of measures which are due to run to the end of next month.

Every indication I would have thought that they're going to be extended and there'll be more talk ahead of the budget.

But so far, the estimates from the likes of the SRI and property finance have been reasonably benign in terms of the impact on growth.

But the issue is, if oil prices do shoot up much further and stay much higher, then I think a lot of those...

Estimates are going to have to be revised.

Yeah, we've all had to learn a bit about it.

Certainly I've had to learn a bit about the different oil markets and how they operate.

And, you know, it's not just all an oil market.

There's markets for jet fuel, markets for home heating oil and so on.

And, you know, looking at the wholesale market for home heating oil when the crisis broke out, there was a lot of talk about, you know,

operators being sharp and increasing prices too quickly but what they did seem to largely reflect what happened in wholesale markets and that was the view of the consumer and competition protection authority who examined the issue as well so there's a lot of twists and turns in this story and as John said there Asia's now started to be hit I think it was clear from the start that

if real trouble did hit it would move i suppose from east to west because asia is the most reliant on uh oil coming from the middle east and uh therefore it's going to be has been the most seriously hit in the initial days initial weeks of all this now we should say for households there hasn't been any increase put through yet for electricity and gas although one player people have power yeah indicated that they're increasing prices they haven't done so yet but the

But it's only a matter of time, Ciarán.

I think the big players are holding off.

But the indication was that come next month, we're likely to see it.

I think things are starting to feed through into bills unless there's a big fall off of prices.

They're hedging strategies, as we saw during COVID, delay the increase in prices when they go up and slow the fall when they come down.