Cutting one's nose unwise.

Prof Nouriel Roubini has been predicting stagflation for years now. The "conditions are right" "for a double whammy of the stagnation of the 1970s and the stock market implosion of 2008", New York Post. "Arguing that the debt ratios were much lower in the 1970s than they are now, Roubini says the upcoming crisis will be much worse." Deglobalization, demographic ageing, climate change, pandemics and wars will contribute to supply chain blocks, rising prices and falling growth, he writes. "Moreover, the sanctions used to deter and punish state aggression are themselves stagflationary. Today, it is Russia against Ukraine and the West. Tomorrow, it could be Iran going nuclear, North Korea engaging in more nuclear brinkmanship, or China attempting to seize Taiwan." "The weaponization of the US dollar that underpins sanctions is also stagflationary." A clear case of 'cut off one's nose to spite one's face'. " We will get a major recession,' Deutsche Bank economists wrote in a report to clients," CNN. "The problem, according to the bank, is that while inflation may be peaking, it will take a 'long time' before it gets back down to the Fed's goal of 2%. That suggests the central bank will raise interest rates so aggressively that it hurts the economy." Jenny Paris wrote of two financial indicators in the US. "One is that traders for the first time see the US Federal Reserve raising its target interest rate by a half-percentage point in each of the next three meetings in May, June and July, which would mark the biggest such increases since 2000. The other is that, for a brief moment, yields on benchmark Treasury Inflation Protected Securities climbed back above zero." Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis President James Bullard, a known inflation hawk, has called for a 75 basis point hike in interest rate next month. "The threat of deglobalization that splits countries into divided blocks could undermine decades of gains in living standards and growth, an IMF official warned," ET. "Just as globalization reflects a process of increasing economic interdependency, deglobalization then marks a retreat from global economic integration. And there are indications that this has been happening for some time already," DW. The reason why the West is mourning the impending demise of globalization is because it gave them untrammeled power over the entire global financial system. "The European Union, US, UK and allies have agreed to exclude a number of Russian banks from Swift, an international payments system used by thousands of financial institutions," BBC. "The sweeping Western sanctions are designed to inflict maximum pain on the country's economy," CNBC. "When fully unleashed, sanctions, too, are weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)," wrote Prof Raghuram Rajan. Exactly. No nation wants to be mass destroyed. "Russia's Gazprom cut Poland and Bulgaria off from its gas..., and threatened to do the same to others, cranking up retaliation for Western sanctions," Reuters. Europe called it "blackmail". Russia cut its own nose with invasion. The West cut its nose with sanctions. Stop yelping.