I'll just put the facts on the table. Wage growth was quite weak through the pandemic. It has rebounded and now it's back to a prepandemic level, roughly 3%. There are a whole variety of different measures of wages and different ones will give you slightly different signals, but it's roughly 3%. We do expect wage growth to increase further. Certainly when you talk to companies they're telling us they're having a hard time attracting workers, they're losing workers. They are telling us they're going to have to increase wages further.
The way we look at wages is we look at wages relative to productivity. To put it bluntly, higher productivity pays for higher wages. In our own projection we think there are good reasons why productivity will pick up. Restrictions are being eased so it's easier to get things done. Companies are investing and that's bringing new capital, which means workers will have better equipment, better computers to work with. That should improve output per worker. We do have wage growth picking up and we also have productivity picking up, and as long that happens higher wages are not a source of inflation. If we were to see wages run substantially ahead of productivity growth it would become a concern that, in that situation, higher wage growth could start to become an independent source of inflation. We're not seeing that yet, but it is something we are watching.