We are currently focused on the crisis, but even before 2008 we did not always experience calm waters. In 1999, we began with a completely new institution – the ECB – and a cooperation among central banks as one unified system.
Inflation began rising sharply towards the end of 2010, as can be seen in figure 4. Initially this rise was driven by food price inflation. Food crop harvests were poor in Uganda and other parts of East Africa, while international world food prices were also pushed up steeply in the first half of 2011 by bad harvests in major cereal producers such as Russia.