Bologna 2021 - Convegno Nazionale "La grande transizione"

2. Relazioni di scenario 49 be honest, we thought these global supply chains were really pretty elastic. And something fundamental is changing. You can’t explain this just by a surge in demand, as these people in the supply chains aren’t stupid. Everybody knew there was a surge in demand coming. That can’t be the underlying structural problem. Let me just be honest, as I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, we don’t understand this, yet. We’ll get to the bottom of it eventually, but I think the thing I need to say is that we have made a very, very sudden shift in the last few months from essentially demand-constrained growth to supply-constrained growth. And we don’t know how long it’s going to last. The second thing is related to that. We have inflation really for the first time. That’s not terribly surprising, nor it is particularly worrying. But the critical question that is being debated in several banks and among policymakers is whether it’s transitional and will fade away or whether we’re in a new era of rising inflation. This is a very complicated debate. It’s important. This isn’t the place to sort of going into the details. So I’ll simply say that my view is that there is a significant risk of heightened inflation that is persistent, but the balance still favors the transitory view. But it will be longer duration than we thought, in part because of the supply-chain situation. The third thing is the pandemic. It is proving stubbornly resistant to subsiding and, to be just as blunt as I can, the global vaccine roll-out is going very badly. The numbers of people vaccinated in low-income countries, including the ones immediately south of here in Africa run in the 3 to 4% range. That’s just unacceptable, unless the goal is to have Delta 2, Delta 3, and Delta 4 coming around. This is just not going to work. I and others are part of the process of trying to make sure that this picture changes, and it looks like it is changing now. Europe sent a very large number of millions of AstraZeneca vaccines back to South Africa. There’s a vaccine pandemic-oriented summit coming up. The United States was reported this morning as having bought an additional 500 million doses to be given to the countries that desperately need them. So maybe we’re turning a corner on that, but this represents at least a significant risk in terms of the speed of recovery. And the final thing I’ll mention will be evident to all of you, which is we’re in a new climate normal. This summer we experienced a set of severe climate events with frequency and severity and global scope that we’ve never seen before. And my view, for

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