The inflationary consequences of Russia’s war will spread

LAST SUMMER, amid mounting alarm about inflation in America, economic advisers in the White House penned a blog post in which they examined historical parallels. Although the press was full of comparisons with oil shocks in the 1970s, they wrote that a nearer relative was the dislocation after the second world war, when supply shortages interacted with pent-up demand. It was a well-reasoned argument. But the surge in commodity prices over the past month, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, gives rise to an unsettling question: is the global economy now seeing a 1970s-style price shock on top of a late-1940s-style supply crunch?