These strains have increased drastically in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and have spread to food. 7  Third, the recovery of supply has also been delayed by the emergence of bottlenecks. The speed with which demand has recovered, and higher goods consumption as a result of the pandemic, have put excessive strains on global production chains, which were still affected in 2021 by the pandemic restrictions. This has led to input supply problems in industries such as semi-conductors, plastics, wood and industrial metals, which have been compounded by serious disruptions in goods transport. In any event, despite the importance of global factors, the impact of the current inflationary episode on the main world economies has been uneven. The variation in the extent of the rise in inflation reflects various idiosyncratic factors that differ in nature, such as the differing speed of the recovery in demand in each region. It also reflects other factors related to the composition of the consumption basket, productive specialisation, positioning in global and regional production chains, labour market slack, the anchoring of expectations and exchange rate fluctuations. Indeed, demand has been particularly vigorous in the United States, which has resulted in more intense and earlier underlying inflationary pressures there. At the end of 2021 private consumption stood more than 4% above its end-2019 level, with a very significant contribution to this rise coming from consumer durables. In the euro area, meanwhile, it stood around 3% lower.
Those who wish to go into this subject in more depth can read our most recent Financial Stability Report. As we know, the property sector consists of two parts: the housing market and the commercial property market. The Riksbank studies the property sector for two main reasons. One reason is that property companies comprise the largest individual borrowers from the banking groups approximately 15 per cent of the banks’ lending is to property companies. Properties are also the dominant form of collateral for loans. Loans with property as collateral comprise almost 50 per cent of the bank’s lending against collateral. The health of the companies in the property sector therefore has repercussions for financial stability. The growth rate for credit has remained at an average level of just over 6 per cent a year for the past four years, which exceeds annual GDP growth by a few percentage points. It could be considered cause for concern to have a higher growth in credit than in fundamentals, i.e. GDP, and it is easy to recall developments at the beginning of the 1990s, but since then there has been a change in the focus of monetary policy and fiscal policy towards macroeconomic stability. At the same time, the effects of earlier as well as new structural reforms, such as the tax reform, the pension reform and deregulation, have also contributed to the Swedish economy becoming less sensitive to disturbances now than it was in the 1980s.