A spectacular mountainous region of the United States will this week provide the setting for central bankers to ponder decisions that will help shape the global economy over the coming months.

Officials from institutions including the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank (ECB) will gather for the annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The meeting comes as the global battle against inflation enters a new phase and markets look for clues about where central banks go next after a series of interest rate hikes.

All eyes will be on Fed chairman Jerome Powell when he delivers a speech on the economic outlook on Friday.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, will also speak on Friday and Ben Broadbent, deputy governor of the Bank of England, takes the stage on Saturday.

Last year, Powell hammered home the Fed’s determination to get on top of inflation in a hawkish speech that promised to act ‘forcefully’ even as he acknowledged rate hikes would bring ‘some pain’ to households and businesses.

Today, the picture looks very different. Inflation in the US has fallen to 3.2pc – still above its 2pc target but much healthier than the 8.5pc level at the same time last year.

Europe has seen inflation fall too, while in the UK – though taking longer to tackle the price spiral – it has dropped to 6.8pc, from a peak of 11.1pc in October last year. Yet Powell is unlikely to be ready to declare victory.

Job numbers and the wider economy have not – until now – been hobbled in the way that many feared would need to happen to try to bring inflation down.

That will be welcome if it means a ‘soft landing’ – bringing inflation down without too many bumps.

But the worry is that signs of still strong wage growth and resilient consumer activity mean the inflation genie has not been entirely stuffed back into the bottle. It leaves rate-setters in a quandary about whether they should soon stop raising rates and how long they should remain there.

The wide-open prairies of the American West provide a suitably dramatic backdrop for the event, which runs from Thursday to Saturday.

In the past, film makers have taken advantage of the picturesque environs, shooting scenes for westerns such as Kevin Costner’s 1990 Oscar-winning blockbuster Dances With Wolves.

For central bankers it provides breathing space away from the hubbub of Washington, London and Frankfurt.

Neither US, UK or European officials have an imminent decision to make, with none of their next rate-setting meetings due until later next month.

But the market backdrop is tricky. Bond yields – the price investors charge for buying government debt – are rising amid growing expectations about interest rates staying higher for longer.

Andrew Hunter, deputy chief UK economist at Capital Economics, said mounting expectations of an ‘economic re-acceleration’ have set a ‘fraught backdrop’ ahead of Powell’s speech.

‘But with little evidence that stronger growth will threaten to reignite inflationary pressures, we don’t think there is any need for Powell to dust off his hawkish script from last year’s event,’ he added.

Ronald Temple, chief market strategist at asset manager Lazard, said: ‘Expect Powell to perform a balancing act of highlighting success to date in reducing headline inflation, while also acknowledging it’s too early to declare victory.’

Temple said Lagarde’s speech is also likely to be ‘straight down the middle of the fairway’, acknowledging that eurozone inflation at 5.3pc remains far too high but recognising that the ECB’s rate hikes so far ‘have not yet fully worked their way into the economy’.

Broadbent will focus on how UK real term incomes – how much people earn after the impact of inflation is taken into account – have changed, from the lead-up to the global financial crisis of 2008, to today.

It will include his views on inflation and the ‘second round’ effects – that is, when wages and prices rise in response, threatening a further spiral.

Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at investment platform CMC Markets UK, said: ‘Markets have been chopping around for several weeks now on the basis that for all the Fed’s hawkish rhetoric, the central bank is close to, or even at the end of its rate hiking cycle.

‘The key question appears to be less about how much further will rate rise, but for how long they will stay at current levels.’

Hell is other people! Fed up renters share their roommates’ most annoying behaviour

By Ellen Coughlan For Mailonline

Updated: 11:07 EDT, 1 August 2023

The chief of the Wagner mercenary group has claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin is being fed lies about ‘colossal’ battlefield failures in Ukraine by ‘mentally ill a**holes’ in Russia’s high command.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, an outspoken critic of the Russian army, said Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu is not telling Putin about the ‘thousands of destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles’ littering the streets of the embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

He claimed Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian army, are bringing ‘total c**p’ to Putin’s desk and are refusing to tell the despot there are ‘colossal problems’ in Bakhmut.

Russia has repeatedly claimed Kyiv‘s counteroffensive is ‘failing’ and Russian troops have inflicted severe casualties on Ukrainian forces. But Prigozhin said the opposite was true with the ‘mentally ill b******* and a**holes’ in Russia’s high command sending thousands of men to their deaths as cannon fodder.

Moscow has also claimed its troops destroyed German-supplied Leopard 2 tanks in Ukraine but Prigozhin slammed such claims as ‘total nonsense’ and ‘lies’.  

In his scathing speech, Prigozhin said the war in Ukraine was triggered by greedy oligarchs wanting even bigger fortunes – not by a threat of Nazism in the country as Putin claims.

And retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the US Army Europe, said that any reports that Ukrainian troops are ‘failing’ on the battlefield and have been forced to stop their counter-offensive is ‘utter nonsense’. 

Hodges pointed to how Commander-in-Chief General Vallerii Zaluzhnyi ‘has, from the very beginning, been very disciplined about protecting information’ from the front lines about any battleground success.

‘And so, when I read reports saying this [Ukrainian counteroffensive] is a failure, they’re having to stop – this is utter nonsense,’ Hodges told Newsweek. 

‘Because you couldn’t declare a failure more than you could declare victory based on what we are able to see,’ the former commander explained.

Prigozhin, whose mercenary troops have spent months fighting in Bakhmut on behalf of the Kremlin, also dismissed Russia’s claims that the army had inflicted heavy losses and the Ukrainian counteroffensive was failing. 

He said Shoigu and the military command were ‘mentally ill a**holes’ who have slaughtered their own men with their incompetence.

‘Their plan was, we’ll throw a few thousands more Russian guys as meat,’ Prigozhin said. ‘They will die like dogs under artillery fire, but we will achieve our goal.’ 

The Wagner boss said his claims about Ukrainian advances in the Zaporizhzhia region hasn’t been reflected by the Russian Defence Ministry or the Kremlin because Shoigu is lying to Putin about Russia’s ‘colossal’ battlefield failures. 

‘I’ll explain why [my words] differ [from the official data],’ Prigozhin said in an audio message, according to Newsweek. ‘Because they are bringing total c**p to the president’s desk, [it’s] shameless. 

‘When we took Bakhmut, we let all military correspondents go there, you remember this well, so that they see the real state of affairs. No one talks about the thousands of destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles.

‘They don’t let anyone there [in Bakhmut], they don’t show anything precisely because there are colossal problems there.’

Prigozhin added: ‘Shoigu and Gerasimov have a simple approach: a lie needs to be monstrous to be believed in. This is what they do.’ 

The Wagner chief said once the war had started Shoigu killed thousands of Russian soldiers and didn’t ‘have enough balls’ to go near the front lines himself.

‘He sat like a coward in his office and at the end of the first day he was very surprised… why the troops could not advance. In the first days of the war, Shoigu killed thousands of Russian soldiers. 

‘He destroyed the most combat-ready part of the army, and a very small part was combat-ready.’

‘Our holy war with those who offend the Russian people, who are trying to humiliate them, has turned into a racket, or rather into rat-mongering raised to…national ideology,’ said Prigozhin.

‘I arrived in Ukraine and asked the commanders on the ground why we do not count the number of killed and wounded soldiers. I was told that no one in the management is interested in this.

‘There are tasks to be completed. The number of dead will be counted after the war. No-one was interested in what it would take to achieve victory.’ 

The only way for Russian to win the war would be to axe the defence ministry, he said.

‘The Russian army is currently retreating in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia directions. The Ukrainians are pushing through the Russian army.

‘We wash ourselves with blood, no-one gives reserves, there is no management, there is still hysteria. What we are being told is a profound deception. The enemy soldiers are not destroyed, and save their equipment. But he doesn’t save ammo. Time is rapidly collapsing.’

Prigozhin said Putin failed to gather his top team around him at the start of the war, conducting all meetings remotely because of fears for his health. 

Foreign leaders contacted Prigozhin ‘en masse and everyone asked one question: how could Russia have sunk into such a monstrous shame?’, the Wagner chief said. 

He continued: ‘It’s a shame for Russia to get into such a deep [mess]. Everyone counted on a miracle, on tactical nuclear weapons, on a nuclear bomb that was about to be thrown on Warsaw.

‘But their balls are not [strong] enough. Weak grandfathers. They cannot get out of their comfort zone.’

Prigozhin also claimed the war was triggered by oligarchs wanting even bigger fortunes. 

‘The oligarchs needed the war,’ he said. ‘It was needed by the clan that actually runs Russia today. This oligarchic clan, they get everything they can.

‘If this clan closes its foreign businesses, the state will immediately divide the domestic businesses and give them to it. That is why businessmen are put in jail, banks are shut down, so that the clan does not lose money.

‘They do not need the money. They have done everything for themselves a long time ago. Clinics with special machines to prevent him from getting cancer and everything else. To live as long as possible.

‘This oligarchic elite thinks only about one thing, how to live as long as possible and that the body is in as good a condition as possible. It’s their brain disease.

‘They don’t think about the country, people, war, or anything but themselves.’

Prigozhin’s latest rant came after he slammed claims by the Russian defence ministry it had killed 1,500 of Kyiv’s soldiers in two days in the embattled city of Bakhmut as ‘absurd science fiction’.

Russia’s defence ministry had claimed earlier this month that Russian forces had repelled two major offensives in South Donetsk. 

It claimed to have killed 1,500 troops and destroyed among other military equipment, eight main battle Leopard tanks supplied to Ukraine by its Western allies and 109 armoured vehicles.

‘Having suffered heavy losses the day before, the Kiev regime reorganized the remnants of the 23rd and 31st mechanized brigades into separate consolidated units, which continued offensive operations,’ the ministry said on Telegram.

‘A complex fire defeat was inflicted by army forces, assault and operational-tactical aviation, missile forces and artillery, as well as heavy flamethrower systems.’

But this was quickly, and very publicly, doubted by Prigozhin, who has repeatedly lambasted senior officials in the Kremlin, the Russian Army and Vladimir Putin himself for perceived missteps in the war effort.

In remarks published on the Telegram channel of his press service, the 61-year-old said to kill that many Ukrainian troops would require daily gains of 150km (93 miles).

‘I therefore believe that this is simply wild and absurd science fiction,’ said Prigozhin.  

Totting up the figures provided by the ministry would imply ‘we have already destroyed the entire planet five times over,’ he added sarcastically.

And last week, Prigozhin resisted an attempt by Shoigu to take control of its ranks. The Wagner chief said his fighters would not sign any contract with the Defence Minister, publicly defying what appear to be efforts to rein in his influence.

Prigozhin has repeatedly attacked Shoigu for what he casts as treachery, slamming him for failing to fight the war in Ukraine properly and taunting him about coming to the frontline.

Tensions with Moscow were ratcheted up when mercenaries kidnapped a frontline Russian general earlier this week, who admitted in a humiliating video to being drunk on duty after allegedly firing on a Wagner vehicle.

A video later emerged which showed the general, Roman Venevitin, accusing Wagner of torturing Putin‘s soldiers and Prigozhin of discrediting the army – a crime which could see him jailed.

In the video from earlier this month, which was reportedly orchestrated by Russian military leaders after Venevitin was released, Venevitin said of Prigozhin: ‘You are engaged in active discrediting of the Russian armed forces.

‘I [am speaking] to convey to the Russian public the truth about what happened, to tell some facts about the so-called Wagner,’ he said. ‘Honour requires me to do this.’

This allegation, which Venevitin appears to read from a script, hints that the authorities are attempting to disempower Prigozhin, who slammed the allegations about his troops’ violence towards Russian ranks as ‘absolute nonsense’. 

Russia’s defence ministry has since urged all ‘volunteer detachments’ to sign contracts with the defence ministry by the end of the month, a step it said would increase the effectiveness of the Russian army.

Though the ministry did not mention Wagner by name in its public statement, the Russian media reported that it was an attempt by Shoigu to bring the mercenaries to heel.