“How do you build your business and increase your profits” was the subject of a webinar this week. Cutting costs and ‘becoming more efficient’ is not, it was confirmed, a long-term strategy. As a business, ‘you can’t save your way to prosperity’ and I’d strongly argue that 10 or more years of austerity have proven it’s the same for a country’s economy. Our rate of inflation makes Britain ‘an outlier, and not in a good way’. ‘Good’, I guess, might have been that we’d ‘taken back control’; but only Italy, in a league of comparable nations, has underlying inflation as bad (but not quite as bad) as ours. There are no easy answers, despite what the ‘if it ain’t hurting’ brigade might tell you. Certainly not a Governor of the Bank of England on £500k a year once again telling those on the minimum wage to ‘exercise restraint when asking for higher pay’. One client told me this week that he was worried we might get a Labour government. Embrace to possibility, I’d say.
‘Inflation remains unchanged’
As inflation remains unchanged and interest rates head up again, there’s ‘no hope on the horizon for hard-pressed households’. And why would there be, as ‘if it ain’t hurting, it ain’t working’.
