What kills me is that the economics of this are completely backwards. The playbook were following is supposed to work like this:

• salaries go up, which increases prices (since salaries are part of the price), which leads to higher wage demands which leads to higher wages because unions are strong and able to negotiate
• the central banks raise interest rates, which cause people to have less money to spend and companies to have less money to invest; this decreases spending and generally winds down the economy, usually by making people unemployed, which decreases bargaining power of unions and thus stops salary increases.

However, what we have is an external price shock situation plus simple price gouging. Salaries don’t drive inflation because the unions are pretty much busted at this point. So raising interest rates only increases the cost of living (and the profits of banks).

What you’d need is a way to do investment that would fix the energy crisis (massive investment in renewables at a scale that can only be done by a state), handling the supply chain issues caused by various wars (don’t have a solution to that one except “beat Russia I guess”), and curbing greedflation (tighter regulation and trustbusting the various suppliers and retailers in the food market, most of whom are monopolies or monopsonies).

The EU also has a specific situation where the energy market is fucked mostly because Germany decided to get all their energy as fossil fuels from Russia, a decision that as bad then and catastrophic now. For reasons of EU nonsense this has made energy prices surge everywhere in the union.

Basically, the people in charge of the economy looked at their one remaining lever of control and went “sure this isn’t the fix for this situation but let’s do it; it’s our only option”. It’s infuriating.