For much of my first year as one of the Evening Standard’s City Voices, I have been warning about the economic pain to come. There’s still a bit of that in the pipeline. But two developments this week have convinced me that we are at the beginning of the end of the economic squeeze on households.
First, the fall in consumer price inflation from 6.8% in July to 6.7% in August announced on Wednesday took it further below the annual growth rate of average earnings in July (the latest data available) of 8.5%. This means that for only the second month since November 2021 “real wages” rose.
