The price of your food shop rocketed because of inflation and now your mortgage is going up hundreds of pounds because the Bank of England decided to increase interest rates. You might be struggling to make ends meet and wondering why our central bank has made your life more difficult.

Across the pond Donald Trump is putting pressure on the American central bank to lower its interest rates, saying he knows more about it than Federal Reserve policymakers. It might seem a tempting proposal to the average American who feels that their central bank has not provided them with the stability it is supposed to.

So what is the role of central banks in all of this? Are they under threat from right-wing populism? And what are the progressive alternatives to dealing with inflation?

This week Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined by Dominic Caddick, economist at NEF, and Sebastian Mang, senior policy advisor at NEF, to discuss.

Music by A.A Aalto (available: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/A_A_Aalto/Connections/Focus/), used under Creative Commons licence: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

Produced by Katrina Gaffney and Margaret Welsh.

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