Reverse Robin Hood, inverted welfare state.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) "expects inflation globally to come back to pre-pandemic levels by the middle of 2022 and highlighted that central banks of countries that are seeing a surge in inflation should not shy away from tightening," wrote Aparna Iyer. "However, India's inflation problem currently stems from a surge in the price of global oil. Here, IMF has said that the impact of oil price shocks on inflation expectations is small but significant." "Central banks are beginning to trim their monetary accommodation, or thinking about doing so, but are starting to trip over their messages," wrote Daniel Moss. "That's what makes the case of Poland so interesting -- and terrifying. The hike of 40 basis points in the benchmark mark to 0.5% not only stunned economists, but appeared to fly in the face of remarks by no lesser person than the bank's governor, Adam Glapinski, who was saying until just a couple days earlier that such a move was some ways off." The Bank of Korea raised policy rates in August and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand did the same last week. "Thirty-nine percent of India's CPI basket is food items," wrote Roshan Kishore. "Food inflation has come down from 5.35% in June 2021 to 0.68% in September 2021." "Non-food inflation has been hovering around the 7% mark during this period." Petrol and diesel prices are at record levels. "Oil marketing companies have once again hiked fuel prices today. This is the 14th time that petrol price has been hiked in two weeks, while diesel rates have gone up 17 times in three weeks," Economic Times (ET). Record fuel prices should affect transport costs on everything, but "A look a the inflation data tends to support the hypothesis of weak demand conditions muting a cascading effect of fuel prices." In its October meeting the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) left policy rate unchanged at 4%, maintaining a negative interest rate, even if retail inflation is lower than it was. The RBI forecast annual inflation for 2021-22 at 5.3%, lower than its earlier forecast of 5.7%, but much higher than its policy rate, ET. "Senior citizens and others depending upon income from bank fixed deposit (FD) schemes will be at the receiving end with retail inflation exceeding the interest rates," The Hindu. Apparently lower borrowing costs are to help businesses to set up new plants, which will increase employment and lead to economic growth. Very laudable. But the biggest borrower by far is the government. "The government's fiscal deficit stood at Rs 4.68 lakh crore (Rs 4.68 trillion) or 31.1 percent of budget estimates at the end of August," ET. "As money printing has driven down rates, the central government's average cost of borrowing in 2020-21 stood at just 5.8%, the lowest in 17 years," wrote Vivek Kaul. "This has helped the government, given that it needs to borrow close to Rs 25 trillion between April 2020 and March 2022." While the US government has been issuing stimulus checks to its taxpayers, usa.gov, our government has been extorting vast amounts of taxes from citizens and the RBI has been busy transferring our savings to the government. This will make the Indian economy grow at 7.5-8.5% for the next 10 years, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the US, Hindustan Times. Rob the poor, give to the government. New definition of welfare state.