Last year the global economy came juddering to a halt. This year it got moving again, only to become stuck in one of history’s biggest traffic jams.
New indicators developed by Bloomberg Economics underscore the extremity of the problem, the world’s failure to find a quick fix and how in some regions the Big Crunch of 2021 is still getting worse.
The research quantifies what’s apparent to the naked eye across much of the planet — in supermarkets with empty shelves, ports where ships are backed up far offshore or car plants where output is held back by a lack of microchips. Looming over all of these: rising price tags on almost everything.