Inflation

Spare a thought for Miami nightclub owners. In recent years, they rode the cryptocurrency wave, raking it in by catering to the fragile egos of geeky crypto bros eager to flaunt their newfound wealth. Now, in the midst of the cryptocrash, business has slowed dramatically. “Out of the blue, all these kids from crypto started coming down and spending a lot of money — like, an insane amount of money,” one of the city’s nightlife impresarios told the Financial Times recently. Now, he said, they have “completely disappeared.” If empty nightclub tables in South Beach are an amusing but indirect indicator of the crypto slowdown, a more immediate warning sign was the spectacular implosion of FTX, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, late last year.

Are we in a permanent state of crisis? The Britain-based lexicographers at the Collins Dictionary think so. Last month they chose “permacrisis” as their word of the year. Defining the neologism as “an extended period of instability and insecurity,” Collins explained that their selection “sums up quite succinctly how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people.” It’s easy to see why the word has particular resonance for the Brits, now onto their third prime minister this year. But the sense that we are stuck in an endless cycle of crises is a global one. As 2022 draws to a close, the world faces a daunting set of overlapping disasters.

This has, so far, been a year of hard lessons. Spiraling inflation has given households an expensive economic refresher course. A land war in Europe has offered an unwelcome reminder of old geopolitical and military truths. But arguably the most important lesson of 2022 concerns the point at which these economic, military and geopolitical considerations converge: energy. On this vital issue, the West has suffered from an epidemic of amnesia in recent years. Too often energy security has either been taken for granted by policymakers and voters, for whom the last energy crisis had become a distant memory, or actively disparaged by an environmental movement whose hardline hostility to fossil fuels has become received wisdom in polite circles.

As Americans confront high inflation rates, tumbling prices at the gas pump are at least giving them a little relief. Brent Crude, the global benchmark for oil, has declined by 27 percent from its $127 peak six months ago. Gas prices in the United States, which were averaging just over $5 a gallon earlier in the summer, are now in the $3.72 range. That means Americans are saving $10 to $15 every time they fill up their tanks. Yet crude is a global commodity, and its price can fluctuate for any number of reasons — war, recession, and an economic slowdown in China to name but a few.