Jacking up interest rates to bring down inflation hits people on moderate incomes harder than the better off. Bluntly, it’s a ridiculous, outmoded way of trying to bring down prices actually pushed up by very real-world, increasingly intractable phenomena such as climate breakdown in the wake of the pandemic and Russian military violence towards Ukraine.

From food to energy and rent, most people are forced to spend a big chunk of their income on basics, which are rising way faster than the headline inflation rate. Rate hikes explicitly throttle wages and employment. Food price inflation and volatility are increasingly the result of climate breakdown (significant flooding has produced some of the worst harvests in recent memory).

Most large companies *still* manage to pass on higher costs to us, maintaining or sometimes even increasing their profit margins.

The massive cost of living surge for ordinary people was a significant factor in Trump’s recent victory. We need urgently to put into practice some of the array of successful existing mechanisms to reduce some prices and the inequalities that price surges create.

Minimum energy price guarantees, publicly owned buffer stocks of food and energy, price gouging laws, windfall profit taxes and more; there’s a plethora of tried and tested interventions we could deploy.

With a third of prices still under government control even in famously financially sober Switzerland, what’s really to fear from trying something other than interest rate rises to push back against inflation?