Supplier's prices have shot through the roof in the last quarter and people's buying power has decreased through inflation which seems like a recipe to slow down the economy but, I'm not an economist.
I personally think that we might end up like Japan with a permanently low interest rate at the cost of stagnation and continued inflation that destroys the middle class and pushes people on the fringes further.
It's likely that the whole pandemic measures while legitimate in itself, also had a second ulterior beneficiaries, the ability to massively lockdown segments of the population and keep them inside. Looking at the Shanghai and now Beijing lockdown reminds of this yet the cases continue to rise which tells me the primary motive isn't to reduce covid over there. It will take far less to pull off the same thing in free societies, fear portrayed by mainstream media and experts is all that is necessary to keep everybody from participating in mass protests and violence.
It is said that if you do business with authoritarian countries, you start to resemble them and I fear that we are headed towards something like that from all we've seen in the past 3 years especially.
As they say, you can judge a person by the company they keep. This is probably true of any system. You can evaluate a system by that which it is entangled with.