Mr. Gabriel Makhlouf:

It is going up because those bottlenecks are taking time to reopen and the war in Ukraine, if I can come to that now, has exacerbated it and made it worse. That is one reason, as I said earlier, I am not ready to predict what the peak will be. We still believe over that time, however, inflation is going to come down. I think it is going to start coming down in the second half of this year. It is, however, going to remain much higher than the forecasts we made back in December, for example. That is certainly the case.

Economists tend to talk about inflation being driven by either demand-side or supply-side factors. A characteristic of the inflation we are seeing now is that it is very much driven by supply-side shocks where monetary policy, in which we raise interest rates, has less potential to work compared to addressing a demand-type shock.