Mark Blyth
speaker
294 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 3 Jul
Mark Blyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I have no idea what Kevin means by that, that inflation is a choice.
If he means that if you are at the bottom half of the American income distribution or the Irish income distribution and prices go up by 5%, the choice is do you put food on the table or you don't?
So I literally have no idea what he's talking about in that regard.
Well, they can in the sense that what they can do is make things more expensive.
But the point I was making is if you're in the top 20% of the income distribution and you shop at, let's say, Waitrose, you've got plenty of cash, and price has got 5%, you barely notice it.
Interest rates go up, you might notice it a little bit more.
You're at the bottom 20%, you absolutely notice this.
So this is a very kind of asymmetric way of dealing with this.
We have this notion that we all suffer from inflation, but the point of the book is to show that we don't suffer from it equally.
So when we raise interest rates, what we're basically doing is punishing people who have got debt and rewarding people who are lenders.
The cost of energy is part of it because the big spike in energy we've recently seen, obviously, is 40% of what we've seen in the past few months.
But the bigger one is when we measure inflation, what we're actually measuring is the cost of things we consume.
So here's a simple distinction.
If you own a house, it doesn't count as inflation because you don't eat your house.
If you're in the bottom 20% and you're a renter, that actually counts into the inflation basket.
And also, you spend much more of your day-to-day income on things that you consume.
So that's why these guys are feeling 25% more than the people at the top.
It's all about what you consume.
And if things that you consume are going up and you consume more of them, it's going to hit you more.
Both of those things are simultaneously true.
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