The post-pandemic economy continues to perform as a cosmic slot machine, firing out random hardships in novelty combinations. This week: New Zealand is dangerously short of chefs and bus drivers, and France has run out of mustard.
There seems no end in sight to these odd manifestations of what you’d have to call economic long Covid. Everyone accepts the pandemic necessarily caused fiscal and economic ructions. Now it seems that the emergency treatment is indefinitely prolonging our suffering.
Everyone seems to agree that what has gone up thanks to Covid – debt, inflation, prices, shortages – must come down. But achieving this without the general population feeling as though
