6 March

There’s a genuine risk of stagflation this year. Like the worst of all possible worlds. High prices, high unemployment, nobody buys anything. It happened in the 1970s, when Big Oil formed a cartel to drive oil prices through the roof. (You can see their fingerprints are all over most things that are bad for us right now.) But it’s worse this time, because we’re also carrying astronomical levels of personal and government debt. And we’re in a pandemic. Positive thinking (i.e. no thinking, let’s be teenagers for the rest of our lives of fun times) won’t fix one piece of that disaster-puzzle. Be ready, get your debt levels down, avoid Covid, trim your energy and transport and groceries costs, try to make sure you have a secure job.