The pandemic may be officially over, but the crises it spawned, directly or indirectly, remain extremely with us.
On Wall Street, we've got the banking crisis.
In Washington, the debt ceiling crisis.
Around the world, there's an inflation crisis.
And in Italy, there is a very real, somewhat mysterious, pasta crisis.
Here's the deal: The Italian government, consumer advocates and pasta makers convened emergency talks Thursday to noodle on the reason behind pasta's nearly 18% price surge over the past year.
The price jump is more than double Italy's broader measure of consumer price inflation, which stood at 8.1%. Meanwhile, the price of wheat — pasta's main ingredient — has fallen.
A spokesperson for Adolfo Urso, the minister who convened the pasta panel, said many producers had already provided assurances that price increases were only temporary, and attributed the high prices to "the disposal of inventories made when the cost of raw materials was higher."
"In a few weeks, prices will be lowered, as production costs have considerably reduced," the spokesperson added.
Italy's farmers association said there was little justification for the higher costs, which haven't translated to higher revenues for wheat farmers. It added that, despite the price of durum wheat being fairly uniform across Italy, the retail price of pasta varied widely across the country.
Unsurprisingly, some are suggesting prices have been artificially propped up to boost profits. Sound familiar? (Back in March, we wrote about US food producers doing more or less the same thing because, well, they can.)
My CNN colleagues in Rome and London have more on the pasta problem here.
RELATED: US inflation is cooling, but a handful of goods and services — day care, margarine and car repairs — are getting more expensive.
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