LONDON — The European Commission is poised to propose the only short-term fix available for a plunge in carbon prices, removing surplus emissions permits in an action that may still do little to increase low-carbon investment.
I hope I am not alone in being slightly surprised that, after the serious recessions experienced in the west and Japan as a consequence of the two oil shocks of the 1970s – when huge increases in the price removed purchasing power and caused a serious inflationary spiral – the reverse movement in oil prices should also be considered an all-round disaster.
If food and energy prices are removed from the consumer price index, the prices for everything else are up only 1.3 percent from a year earlier, according to the government.
When volatile food and energy prices are removed, the core index rose 0.1 percent in August, compared with a 0.3 percent increase in July, which was the largest gain since January.
But if the effects of rising fuel and food prices are removed, by excluding energy and unprocessed food, real average earnings would have risen over the decade, to £335 a week.
Reforms have also freed up agricultural prices by removing artificial price supports.
And many suspected its interference in April when McDonald's slowed price increases for the Big Mac used to calculate this newspaper's relative-price index and removed it from its main menu.The long-term outlook is equally dicey.
In a recent dust-up after Macmillan told Amazon it was moving to the 30 percent agency model with higher consumer pricing, Amazon removed direct access to Macmillan's physical and electronic books from its site for a week.
Buoyed by the return of consumer confidence, firms have boosted investment in tandem (see chart).This seems odd, given how pitifully low wages have been (even if a collapse in the oil price has removed some of the pressure).
It argues that this would improve the quality of the NYSE's prices by removing a cross-subsidy (free use of price data) to regional exchanges, without which some would go bust, leading to more trading in New York.
