How the Home of America's Worst Inflation Got That Way

While the world's multimillionaires and billionaires (and multibillionaires) ponder inflation and supply shortages in the Swiss Alps, they might get a better view from the dusty landscape of Midland, Texas. Residents of the oil town have lived through inflation around 10% or higher for six months. Even worse, the forces driving up prices there may take months or even years to unwind.

Bloomberg reporter Katia Dmitrieva takes listeners to that West Texas boom-and-bust community, home to the highest inflation rate among roughly 400 metropolitan areas tracked by Moody's Analytics. While there, she meets an excavation company owner who's run out of heavy-duty pickup trucks and bulldozers because of supply-chain shortages. Nurses are in such short supply that a local health-care company is paying $280 an hour to get them on contract. And the line of cars waiting at the West Texas Food Bank is longer than it's been since the worst days of the ongoing pandemic.

Back in Davos, host Stephanie Flanders chats about deglobalization with economist Richard Baldwin, a professor at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He's skeptical that trade actually is fragmenting, arguing that China is the "OPEC of industrial inputs" and that "you can't shut off OPEC." Finally, Flanders talks global commerce at the World Economic Forum with the head of the World Trade Organization and the European Union trade commissioner, as well as officials with the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry and US-based logistics firm Flexport.

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