Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank President, said she plans on raising interest rates only gradually, while acknowledging that the EU’s inflation problem was steadily getting worse.

Speaking at the ECB’s annual economic policy conference in Portugal on Tuesday, Ms Lagarde said Europe’s inflation problem was deepening, but warned that the region also faced weaker growth prospects related to the war in Ukraine.

And

The ECB’s gradualism, as Ms Lagarde described its approach, reflects the larger economic blow that the war in Ukraine has dealt to Europe….

President Joe Biden (D) also (in)famously blames Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for the high inflation in the US.

Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, and Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO and ex-Executive Chairman of Google and its successor, Alphabet Inc, in a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, expressed considerable concern over the US’ growing dependency on other nations for computer chips that are critical to our economy (and to our national security, I add). They proposed three steps to alleviate this dependency.

• double down on [US’] strength in the manufacturing of less-advanced semiconductors

Vladimir Putin is extending his murderously physical war on Ukraine into an economic war against Ukraine’s European nation supporters.

Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom PJSC throttled deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany this week….

And

Russian natural gas deliveries through a key pipeline to Europe will drop by around 40% this year, state-controlled energy giant Gazprom said Tuesday….

And

Slovakia’s state-owned gas importer SPP said it expected Thursday’s Russian gas deliveries to be reduced by about 30%, while Czech power utility CEZ said it had seen a similar fall….

And