The ECB president had to go to the stalls in Florence to realize how much fruit and vegetables cost: “I checked the food prices very carefully and yes, they have increased.” The fear is that to lower them he will decide to raise interest rates
This is a sort of appeal to the European institutions: «Hold the lady Christine Lagarde as far as possible from reality and above all from street markets and street markets in general”. The recommendation is particularly valid for the period ahead of us where there will be the inexorable Christmas markets. The president of the ECB, yesterday, after visiting the Sant’Ambrogio market in Florence, said this: «I checked food prices very carefully and yes, they have increased, but much less than two years ago. Now they are still increasing and are higher than the average inflation we have.” Already here I thought, in the classic Tuscan spirit, that it was a joke by Cristina Laguardia, but this time the guard actually did it: on the tip of his heel (because on the forehand it’s a landslide) he wandered around checking, like Sherlock Holmes, complete with a magnifying glass, the prices of green beans and persimmons, apples and pears, carrots and asparagus. In front of the asparagus, the lady paused because of the particularly high price, not knowing that the vegetable is out of season and therefore is imported from other countries by cargo plane. After all, I think that the Lagarde to have fun, go into a supermarket every now and then, get on a trolley and let the co-workers push you around for a bit of fun. I don’t think it has seen a real price since the 1970s. Yet, it is the one at the presidency of the bank who should control inflation, i.e. the increase in prices.
It took the Governing Council of the European Central Bank, which is taking place in the Tuscan capital, to give it the opportunity to check the prices of food products. I would have paid gold to attend a conversation between a manager of a Florentine bank and the Lagarde. I wish the lady hadn’t recognized her because if someone had shouted: “Oh, there’s this one who keeps inflation at bay in Europe!”, they would have given her the vegetables for free and thrown them behind her. Poor lady Lagardethey would have disheveled her perhaps with a salad basket stuck to her head on that always so well-coiffed hair. I have the impression that she is Ursula von der Leyen they have the same hairdresser, a bit like there Lady in yellow.
But let’s go back to what he said: «So we have an average of about 2% (of inflation, ed) and food prices are a little higher and we need to make sure they continue to go down, because food is important.” But wow! But think about it! We discovered live from the Sant’Ambrogio market in Florence that “food is imported”. I swear: we never thought about it.
Unfortunately for the lady from the ECB, just yesterday morning I was at the Bollate market, as I usually do Forehand and backhandand I saw that green beans fluctuated between 7 and 9 euros, a monstrous figure. One of the two, either European officials have been instructed to go to the Sant’Ambrogio market and change all the labels before the visit of the Lagarde decreasing in prices, or the lady doesn’t know how to do even the minimum calculations. When they were so expensive they cost 3 or 4 euros per kilo. You don’t need to read a book by Stiglitz or Krugman to say that they have doubled, they have not increased at all much less than two years ago.
But do you know what terrifies us most? It’s that Mrs Lagarde decide to reduce the price of the green beans themselves with the only instrument in their hands, which is that of interest rates, following this reasoning which borders on the delirium tremens (and which we could call the Green Bean Theorem): since green beans have increased, it is clear that there is too much money around, so I increase interest rates, so the price of green beans also decreases. Except that this is a reasoning that seems like that of the Baron of Münchhausen, who was the one who wanted to get out of the swamp by pulling himself by the hair.
But why did they bring it to the market? Don’t show her reality and think she’ll change her mind: these burosaurs don’t change their minds when faced with reality, they have their crazy ideas about the economy and they keep them. But how does the president of the ECB make statements like: “We must make sure that prices continue to fall because food is important”? I, who frequent bars, assure you that the level of economic reasoning of those who frequent them seems like that of a Nobel Prize winner in comparison. But then, with hundreds of people working for the ECB, does the lady need to visit a Florentine market to understand the prices of food? What the fuck are those hundreds of people doing? Send them, every now and then, to the markets all over Europe before drawing up the reports, at least they will be more realistic and, perhaps, even more scientific because they will draw their source from real and not virtual economic reality.
I hope that the lady’s cleats have slipped between one stone and another in the market: at least she will have realized that she is on this earth and that she is not traveling on board a hydrofoil that keeps her at a safe distance. Here, we have found the exact definition for the economic thought of Lagarde: Land hydrofoil theory; at due speed it rises from the earth, that is, from reality, and from that position it makes decisions about reality itself at a due distance, precisely, from the same reality.
My goodness, how are we. If one were to put together an anthology of the sentences of the Lagarde could be titled: «Humorous-delusional treatise on economics». Amen.
