https://bit.ly/3SCBdBz

By extension, Russia and China have been the main “guarantors of macro peace”, providing all the cheap stuff that was the source of deflation fears in the West, which, in turn, gave central banks the license for years of money printing (QE).

Wars are hard to forecast...
...as are all the “tits” for “tats” in an unrestricted, geostrategic game of Go (or chess, depending on your perspective

 

Instead of playing “catch-up” with the pre-GFC trend of aggregate incomes, we’re now playing “catch-down” to the post-nativist, post-Covid, and post-Ukraine trend of aggregate supply. 

The level of economic activity needs to adjust down in an “L”-shaped manner. If it doesn’t, we will have more inflation problems...
In this context, the market’s recession/no-recession soul-searching is ridiculous: 

The Masque of Pandora Alastair Crooke

The Pandemic Is a Portal

This strange dream like sequence of non linear time has been the overwhelming experience for what feels like an eternity now.

Jul 3 The choice for Western Policy Makers is extraordinarily bleak. 

a ''Fairy Tale'' reality and a geoeconomic boomerang effect which is shredding the standard of living in the West and whose consequence will be Regime Change in Western Capitals long before Moscow.

@Nouriel  Sees Either US Hard Landing or Uncontrolled Inflation @markets 

Economist Nouriel Roubini said there are two options for the US economy, given the Federal Reserve’s most-aggressive tightening campaign in decades: an economic hard landing or inflation at a persistently elevated level.
“The fed funds rate should be going well above 4% -- 4.5%-5% in my view -- to really push inflation towards 2%,” the chairman and chief executive officer of Roubini Macro Associates said 
“If that doesn’t happen, inflation expectations are going to get unhinged,” said Roubini, whose prescience on the housing bubble that led to the US financial crisis of more than a decade ago earned him the nickname Dr. Doom. 

“Or if that happens, then we are going to have a hard landing. Either way, either you get a hard landing or you get inflation getting out of control.”
The central bank’s latest dot plot of interest-rate projections published after the June policy meeting suggests that the federal funds rate will reach around 3.375% by the end of this year and almost 3.8% by the end of 2023. That’s not hawkish enough, said Roubini.
“Even if you have 3.8%, we have inflation still well above target around 8%, falling only gradually,” he said. “Markets expecting a pivot and the Fed cutting rates next year to me sounds delusional.”
Roubini joins a chorus of prominent economists, including Goldman Sachs & Co. Chief Economist Jan Hatzius, who think it will be difficult for the central bank to avoid a deep and painful recession, also known as a hard landing.

“In the US, whenever you had inflation above 5% and unemployment below 5%, the Fed tightening has led to a hard landing,” Roubini said. “So my baseline is a hard landing.”

US inflation decelerated in July by more than expected, which investors speculated took some pressure off the Fed to continue hiking interest rates aggressively. 

The consumer price index increased 8.5% from a year earlier, cooling from the 9.1% June advance that was the largest in four decades.
The producer price index, meanwhile, decreased 0.5% from a month earlier, according to US report last week. 

While some market watchers celebrated the consecutive data as evidence that inflation may have peaked, Roubini had other concerns. 
“It might have peaked but the question is how fast is it going to fall? With the Fed still having real rates on the policy side highly negative, I don’t think the monetary policy is tight enough to push inflation toward 2% fast enough,” Roubini said. 

“We are still in a severely inflationary environment, not just in the United States but around the world.”
He added that geopolitical events may contribute to further spikes in inflation, including China’s stringent Covid Zero policy, which require authorities to shut down businesses and lock down the population in the event of major outbreaks. 
Roubini also said the ongoing war in Ukraine may put pressure anew on commodity prices, particularly energy, and expressed concern on the possibility of a wage-price spiral.

Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ

Jul 3 One can create inorganic cascade like price moves in the derivatives market and thereby control the physical commodity.

Western markets are turbo finiancialized and for an eternity, Western banks and Central Banks have been able to distort the commodity price complex with little difficulty. 
Take the Gold market for example where derivatives are 100x the underlying. 
One can create inorganic cascade like price moves in the derivatives market and thereby control the physical commodity. 
There are plenty of examples of these inorganic price moves. In essence, the Tail wags the dog. 
The challenge is where the Supply/Demand balance is precarious and a small adjustment [reduce Supply or increase Demand] tips the situation into disequilibrium. 
The Tail will no longer wag the Dog and the Dog will simply run amok.

Nigeria's inflation rate quickens to 19.6%, the highest level since September 2005 and more than double the 9% ceiling of the central bank’s target band

Annual food-price growth soared to 22% from 20.6% in June and core inflation, which strips out food costs, quickened to 16.26% in July, compared with 15.75% the previous month. Prices rose 1.8% against the previous month.