Financial markets are on red alert over eurozone inflation and a possible increase in ECB interest rates but there is reason for asking if they are exaggerating.
Running a car may cost more because of sky-high oil prices but there is no sign yet that Europe and the wider world will come anywhere near double-digit inflation of the kind that went hand-in-hand with the big oil crises of the 1970s.
On that much, most analysts agree. Additionally, the world is a different place now, where globalisation and the rise of China and India have intensified price competition and where moderate wage rise deals have been the norm for some time.
It takes a brave stockbroker, trader or investment bank analyst to ignore the rest of the pack, however, when their job is to guess in a semi-scientific way the timing and size of changes in the European Central Bank's official interest rates.
The ECB is talking up a storm about the risk that high oil prices spill over and generate what it calls second-round effects - primarily demands for big wage rises which in turn kick off a vicious circle of inflation.
It has the unenviable task of trying to keep inflation at bay without rushing into an interest rate rise that could derail a still elusive recovery in the euro zone economy, where output is predicted to grow by little more than one per cent this year.
James Hamilton, Professor of Economics at California's San Diego university, argues that the inflation spiral of the 1970s and the recessions that followed the two big oil crises were as much due to economic and monetary policy as to high oil prices.
"Pick your poison, inflation or recession. Personally I'm more scared of the second," he said in an internet blog.
But an increasing number of market economists see a risk of the ECB raising its key interest rate - now at a historic low of two per cent for more than two years - more quickly than they were previously predicting, perhaps as early as December.
Which begs some more fundamental questions.
Why should labour costs surge now, when they have dropped in all but one of the past 10 years, even when economic growth was far stronger than at the moment?
Can past experience serve as a useful gauge of inflationary risks in an era where globalisation, cheap Chinese exports and cut-price labour restrain the price of goods and force people to worry more about keeping a job than securing a pay hike?
As far as core inflation is concerned, there is nothing obvious at this stage to suggest high oil prices are causing the sort of broad, systemic rise in inflation that might take hold if wages rose sharply and significantly.
Unit labour costs, the central banker's favourite measure as it links pay to the amount of national output produced by every employee, fell 0.3 per cent in the euro zone in 2000, at a time when economic growth hit its high of the decade at 3.6 per cent.
If you assume it takes time for bumper growth to feed into higher wage deals, you might expect something different in the years following. But unit labour costs fell the next year and every year since.
For at least some economists, employees and unions no longer respond through wage demands in such a knee-jerk way to minor ups and downs in GDP.