With all the talk of chaos at the pumps I recently went to my petrol station and discovered that the air pump for your tyres, now cost money. I asked the guy at the till and he said “that’s “inflation” for you”

Unfortunately inflation in the economic sense of the word is not a joke though and much like the disgraced former governor of New York has been creeping up on people for some time. This has mostly been hidden by the fact that people aren't buying as many train tickets or going out or the like as they used to so their credit card bills are quite a bit lower than they would have been. Nonetheless food and energy prices have been rising fairly quickly and it’s somewhat scary when you look at how quickly the price of meat is going up by. My kid has a book that says that cows go moo and chickens go cheap, but they certainly aren't going very cheap at my local supermarket.

There’s an expression that fish can’t see water, and unfortunately that’s where the public seem to be when it comes to price rises, unless they’re big ticket items like a car or a new phone. With the latter of those, I guess that Apple is truly one of the most futuristic companies out there in so much as the prices have already taken the next 10 years worth of inflation into account. Either way when interest rates are eventually forced to rise the situation could very quickly (and dangerously) turn critical with inflation jumping into at least double digits and cash savings destroyed in the space of 2 or 3 years. I have most of my money tied up in stocks shares, because it’s nice to have some company.

The current situation has arisen for 2 reasons

1. The boring explanation. Specifically 18 months of the public staying at home not spending money has led to a glut of pent up spending, all of which is happening at a time when supply issues have led to already increased prices and a demand for higher pay, thus causing an inflationary spiral upwards.
2. The more conspiratorial one. That governments around the world are up to their eyeballs in debt and desperate to spin the economy up so that the inflated money supply overtakes the debt burden. If they can keep things under control then they’ll slowly hammer the debt ratio downwards, just like they did after the war.

Where your opinion lies largely comes down to whether you think the world is run by scheming Machiavellian puppet-master geniuses who are 3 steps ahead of everyone. Or perhaps it’s just a random mess, nobody’s in control of anything but we do have some lazy and rather negligent people happy to claim credit for their part a socioeconomic system that nobody properly understands. Who would you like in charge, the New World Order or literally nobody. I don’t know which of those is scarier really.
Here’s a joke to close. How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a light bulb?
The real question is that who broke the light bulb and why are they keeping us in the dark?