Government shared bad news about the inflation in Hungary

Citing the central bank’s forecast, the minister said the rate of inflation would continue to increase in the coming months and only start to decrease next year, Márton Nagy, the minister for economic development said.

In view of the coming winter, phasing out price caps would make no sense, Nagy said. He added, however, that “price caps will not stay with us forever, we must get rid of them sooner or later”.

Meanwhile, Gergely Gulyás, the prime minister’s chief of staff, qualified the European Parliament’s Thursday decision condemning Hungary on rule-of-law grounds as “the Hungarian left wing’s effort to prevent the country from getting access to EU funds that are due to it”.

Asked about the EU sanctions imposed on Russia, Gulyás said no one disputed that Russia had violated international law by attacking Ukraine but the sanctions had generated windfall profits for Russia and impoverished Europe. All European governments are struggling to save their energy-intensive businesses, he said.

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Nagy called the United States one of the biggest winners of the sanctions. The US price of gas is merely the sixth of the EU and Asian level, with the energy costs of US companies remaining by and large unchanged over the past year or two, he said.

Gulyás qualified the EC’s decision to refrain from proposing a price cap on gas as “a temporary victory of common sense”. A measure like that would have generated shortage, endangered the heating of homes and hit the European economies, he said.

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Source: MTI