“Lines of cars snake from gasoline stations. Fights break out among angry motorists trying to get fuel. Grocery staples are out of stock on store shelves. A charity warns that doubling heating bills will force a million households to rely on extra blankets to stay warm. This was supposed to be the year the U.K. broke free of the European Union and forged ahead as a buccaneering free trader, delivering the benefits of a new, confident ‘Global Britain’ to workers and companies at home. Instead, that picture of Brexit utopia is looking more like a dystopia. As Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party gathers at its annual conference this week, the promise of self-determination has given way to a foreboding sense of economic isolation” Bloomberg reports.
“A confluence of crises has forced the government to deploy soldiers to drive fuel trucks, energy suppliers to go out of business and panicked households to try and fill cupboards – all while Covid-19 is still rife. The pound, meanwhile, has been trading like an emerging-market currency rather than from a steady Group of Seven country. The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, even quipped whether a plague of locusts would be next to beset the U.K. He now has the task of figuring out how to raise interest rates to subdue inflation without choking the economy.”